Multiple Sclerosis Case Study

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Multiple sclerosis, or MS, is an incurable disease that attacks the nervous system. Treatments used for this disease can be split into three categories: treatment for relapses, treatment for specific MS symptoms, and treatment to reduce relapses. This study focused on treatment for relapses, and specifically the effectiveness of oral and intravenous (IV) steroids. The results were that there was a statistically significant difference between the two, and that doctors should “consider using oral instead of IV steroids in patients with relapsing multiple sclerosis.” The citation for the article is: Deitelzweig, Steven, William Carter, David Kitchell, Alan Hathcock, Jeremiah Newsom, and Frank Wharton. "Oral Steroids Not Inferior to Intravenous Steroids in Multiple Sclerosis Relapses." The Hospitalist. Society of Hospital Medicine, 4 Nov. 2015. Web. 6 Nov. 2015. A null hypothesis (HO) is where the study finds no significant difference between what is being tested. The alternative hypothesis (HA), on the other hand, is where the differences between the two was influenced by something other than chance. Since IV steroids were considered the standard treatment for MS relapses the null hypothesis …show more content…
For this article the FPR would be saying that the treatment is that oral steroids are more effective when they were not. This comes from the fact that IV steroids are the normal treatment, they are the standard and obviously work, oral steroids are what’s being tested, what you want to see being more effective or less. So a false positive in this situation would be saying they are better when they aren’t. That’s the risk with rejecting the null and accepting the alternative, and since the null was rejected we know that the p-value is less than alpha, which we assume to be