ArticleAmerican journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation2019
A Tale of Confusion From Overlapping Confidence Intervals.
Article in American journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Rate adaptive pacing in people with chronic heart failure increases peak heart rate but not peak exercise capacity: a systematic review.Heart failure reviews · 2023Pooled it
- Tracking spasticity dynamics in hemiparetic stroke survivors following cyproheptadine administration: a pilot study using controlled varying tendon indentation depths.Frontiers in stroke · 2025Article
- The descriptive analysis of depressive symptoms and White Blood Cell (WBC) count between the sexual minorities and heterosexual identifying individuals in a nationally representative sample: 2005-2014.BMC public health · 2023Article
- A CHecklist for statistical Assessment of Medical Papers (the CHAMP statement): explanation and elaboration.British journal of sports medicine · 2021Article
- Second Primary Malignancies in Diffuse Large B-cell Lymphoma Survivors with 40 Years of Follow Up: Influence of Chemotherapy and Radiation Therapy.Advances in radiation oncologyArticle
Corrections and comments
- Comment on
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In clinical research presentations, study results are commonly reported in the form of P values and confidence intervals as an estimate of association and treatment effect. The interpretation of confidence intervals that overlap can be confusing and difficult for the reader to draw clinically meaningful conclusions. In this brief report, we describe the basics of confidence intervals and present an example from a recently published randomized control trial to illustrate a common confusion that overlapping confidence intervals between the means of two independent groups may not necessarily reject the true significant difference of effect. It is recommended that investigators use the direct difference of means between groups for confidence interval estimation to reduce type II errors. Clinicians should interpret overlapping confidence intervals with caution and avoid the assumption that overlapping confidence intervals always implies a lack of difference of treatment effect to decide application of treatment.
Indexed as
Identifiers
30119088What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.