220-Dictionary of Pharmaceutical Medicine, 2nd Edition-Gerhard Nahler Annette Mollet-3211898352-S

127more categories, e.g. mild, moderate, severe; suitable statisticaltests are e.g. for two groups, unpaired samples the Mann–WhitneyU or median test, for two groups, paired samples Wilcoxon signedrankstest, for multiple groups, unpaired samples Kruskal–Wallisone way analysis of variance and for multiple groups, paired samplesFriedman two-way analysis of variance; → see data.ordinal scale Scales frequently used in clinical trials to quantifyphenomena or outcomes which are non-dimensional, eitheras a “single state” s. (scale is designed to measure patients at asingle point in time, e.g. patients state at entry and at the trial’sconclusion, such as the who-performance status, the keith–wagener classification for hypertensive retinopathy, the Kurtzkescore in multiple sclerosis or the ritchie index in rheumatology,or as “transition” s. (measuring magnitude and direction ofchanges directly and symmetrically, without baseline – time 1 assessment– e.g. –2 much worse, –1 worse, 0 the same, +1 better, +2much better); when using o.s. a few rules should be followed: (1)individual elements of the s. should be clearly defined, and mustassess the same phenomena; (2) ranks should be discrete, nonoverlapping(mutually exclusive) and in a reasonable, hierarchicalorder; (3) scale scores should be placed in a clinical contextand should detect both improvement and deterioration withoutclustering subjects at one extreme on the s.; (4) correct analysesshould be concentrated on within-patient changes, concordance(similar, correlating trends) with other outcome measures shouldbe shown; finally, increments from one rank to the next are usuallyfar from linear and (++) does not mean twice as good or worsethan (+); although scales can be made more sensitive by increasingthe number of levels of severity this is usually accompanied byreduced reliability; → see also quality of life scale, scale,score, validity, visual analog scale.original medical record → see source data.orphan diseases WHO: pathological conditions affecting 65 to100/100,000 of the general population; FDA: incidence