A Multivariate Approach to Analyze Ordinal Data Collected in Clinical Trials of Analgesic Agents

After pointing out the drawbacks of the approach commonly used to analyze the data collected in controlled clinical trials carried out to evaluate the analgesic effect of potential agents, the authors suggest a procedure suitable for analyzing data coded according to an ordinal scale. In the first stage a multivariate analysis is carried out on the codec! data and the projection of each result in the space of the most relevant factors is obtained. In the second stage the whole set of these values is processed by distribution-free tests. The procedure has been applied to data previously published by VENTAITBIDDA et al. [18].