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to further anne's comment
Statistical analysis is a very complicated thing, I know because as part of my psych degree, I had to take 3 stats courses and I never really did get it.
That said, say 75% of the 25% of HER2 patients did find a therapuetic advantage to omega 3. Furthermore, say the theraputic advantage (lets say overall survival advantage of 1 year) was 30%; that is to say that HER2 BC patients taking herceptin and omega-3 lived 30%, or 1 year, longer than HER2 BC patients not taking omega-3. This may or may not translate into statistical significance depending on other variables, esp. sampling size.
To extrapolate into the general population of all BC patients: 75% of 25% of HER2 = 18.75%; and survival advantage= 18.75% * 30% = 5.62% longer survival for the general BC pop. If the survival advantage for the HER2 group was , say 12 months, that means that the survival advantage for the entire study group was 12 months x 5.62% = .6744 OR : 2 1/2 weeks
does 2.5 weeks = statistical significance? I don't know but my whole point of this exercise is to bring about awareness that the numbers quoted in the press are not always what they appear to be.
The same holds true for stage 4 BC survival stats.
Regards,
Al
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Primary care-giver to and advocate for Linda, who passed away April 27, 2006.
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