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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2459 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 16, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In Merck's recent press release for the results of their phase 2 melanoma trial, they said this:

Adjuvant treatment with mRNA-4157/V940 in combination with KEYTRUDA reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 44% (HR=0.56 [95% CI, 0.31-1.08]; one-sided p value=0.0266) compared with KEYTRUDA alone.

Does that confidence interval look wrong to anyone else? It should be geometrically symmetrical around the point estimate, right?

  • 0.56/0.31 = 1.81

  • 1.08/0.56 = 1.93

Even making the most accommodating assumptions about rounding, I can't make the math work out:

0.5649 / 0.3050 * 0.5649 = 1.046

Also, 1.08 is weirdly far from 1 given that the one-tailed p value is only 0.0266. I would expect it to be just barely greater than 1.

Depends on the distribution. For normal or t-distributions, sure, but not for asymmetric ones.

Assuming "HR" means "hazard ratio", it seems likely to be some sort of logistic regression, bounded on the left but not the right. This is not my area of expertise, but I'd expect that to lead to much larger distances on the right tail.

Edit: just saw your comment about other studies. There goes my theory. It might still explain why a 0.025 p wouldn't correspond to 1.0? Either way, I'd really like to see their published numbers now.

This is not my area of expertise, but I'd expect that to lead to much larger distances on the right tail.

It does, but I accounted for that. The right tail is longer than expected even when accounting for the fact that it's logistic. Either there's something I'm not understanding about how this works, or someone screwed up somewhere.

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