scholarly journals How Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms Vary by Age, Sex, and Race/Ethnicity

2021 ◽  
pp. 10.1212/CPJ.0000000000001105
Author(s):  
Ilya Kister ◽  
Tamar Bacon ◽  
Gary R. Cutter

AbstractBackground:Little is known about how symptom severity in the various neurologic domains commonly affected by MS vary by age, sex and race/ethnicity.Methods:This was a retrospective study of MS patients attending two tertiary centers in the NYC metropolitan area, who self-identified as White, African-American (AA), or Hispanic-American (HA). Disability was rated with Patient-determined Disability steps (PDDS) and symptom severity - with SymptoMScreen (SyMS), a validated battery for assessing symptoms in 12 domains. Analyses comparing race, sex, and age groups were carried out using ANOVA Models and Tukey’s HSD multiple comparison tests to control the overall Type I error. A multivariable model was constructed to predict good self-rated health (SRH) that included demographic variables, PDDS and SyMS domain scores.Results:Sample consisted of 2,622 MS patients (age 46.4 years; 73.6% female; 66.4% White, 21.7% AA, 11.9% HA). Men had higher adjusted PDDS than women (p=0.012), but similar total SyMS score. Women reported higher fatigue and anxiety scores (more botheration), while men had higher walking and dexterity scores. AA and HA had higher symptom domain scores than Whites in each of the 12 domains and worse SRH. In a multivariable logistic model, only pain, walking, depression, fatigue, and global disability (PDDS), but not sex or race/ethnicity predicted good SRH.Conclusions:AA and HA race/ethnicity was associated with higher overall disability, higher symptom severity in each of the 12 domains commonly affected by MS, and worse self-rated health relative to Whites. However, only symptom severity and disability, and not demographic variables, predicted good self-rated health.

2018 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-398
Author(s):  
Rudolf Debelak ◽  
Carolin Strobl

M-fluctuation tests are a recently proposed method for detecting differential item functioning in Rasch models. This article discusses a generalization of this method to two additional item response theory models: the two-parametric logistic model and the three-parametric logistic model with a common guessing parameter. The Type I error rate and the power of this method were evaluated by a variety of simulation studies. The results suggest that the new method allows the detection of various forms of differential item functioning in these models, which also includes differential discrimination and differential guessing effects. It is also robust against moderate violations of several assumptions made in the item parameter estimation.


2000 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joni Kettunen ◽  
Niklas Ravaja ◽  
Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen

Abstract We examined the use of smoothing to enhance the detection of response coupling from the activity of different response systems. Three different types of moving average smoothers were applied to both simulated interbeat interval (IBI) and electrodermal activity (EDA) time series and to empirical IBI, EDA, and facial electromyography time series. The results indicated that progressive smoothing increased the efficiency of the detection of response coupling but did not increase the probability of Type I error. The power of the smoothing methods depended on the response characteristics. The benefits and use of the smoothing methods to extract information from psychophysiological time series are discussed.


Methodology ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel C. Voelkle ◽  
Patrick E. McKnight

The use of latent curve models (LCMs) has increased almost exponentially during the last decade. Oftentimes, researchers regard LCM as a “new” method to analyze change with little attention paid to the fact that the technique was originally introduced as an “alternative to standard repeated measures ANOVA and first-order auto-regressive methods” (Meredith & Tisak, 1990, p. 107). In the first part of the paper, this close relationship is reviewed, and it is demonstrated how “traditional” methods, such as the repeated measures ANOVA, and MANOVA, can be formulated as LCMs. Given that latent curve modeling is essentially a large-sample technique, compared to “traditional” finite-sample approaches, the second part of the paper addresses the question to what degree the more flexible LCMs can actually replace some of the older tests by means of a Monte-Carlo simulation. In addition, a structural equation modeling alternative to Mauchly’s (1940) test of sphericity is explored. Although “traditional” methods may be expressed as special cases of more general LCMs, we found the equivalence holds only asymptotically. For practical purposes, however, no approach always outperformed the other alternatives in terms of power and type I error, so the best method to be used depends on the situation. We provide detailed recommendations of when to use which method.


Methodology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jochen Ranger ◽  
Jörg-Tobias Kuhn

In this manuscript, a new approach to the analysis of person fit is presented that is based on the information matrix test of White (1982) . This test can be interpreted as a test of trait stability during the measurement situation. The test follows approximately a χ2-distribution. In small samples, the approximation can be improved by a higher-order expansion. The performance of the test is explored in a simulation study. This simulation study suggests that the test adheres to the nominal Type-I error rate well, although it tends to be conservative in very short scales. The power of the test is compared to the power of four alternative tests of person fit. This comparison corroborates that the power of the information matrix test is similar to the power of the alternative tests. Advantages and areas of application of the information matrix test are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 227 (4) ◽  
pp. 261-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Renkewitz ◽  
Melanie Keiner

Abstract. Publication biases and questionable research practices are assumed to be two of the main causes of low replication rates. Both of these problems lead to severely inflated effect size estimates in meta-analyses. Methodologists have proposed a number of statistical tools to detect such bias in meta-analytic results. We present an evaluation of the performance of six of these tools. To assess the Type I error rate and the statistical power of these methods, we simulated a large variety of literatures that differed with regard to true effect size, heterogeneity, number of available primary studies, and sample sizes of these primary studies; furthermore, simulated studies were subjected to different degrees of publication bias. Our results show that across all simulated conditions, no method consistently outperformed the others. Additionally, all methods performed poorly when true effect sizes were heterogeneous or primary studies had a small chance of being published, irrespective of their results. This suggests that in many actual meta-analyses in psychology, bias will remain undiscovered no matter which detection method is used.


2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (05) ◽  
pp. 343-343

We have to report marginal changes in the empirical type I error rates for the cut-offs 2/3 and 4/7 of Table 4, Table 5 and Table 6 of the paper “Influence of Selection Bias on the Test Decision – A Simulation Study” by M. Tamm, E. Cramer, L. N. Kennes, N. Heussen (Methods Inf Med 2012; 51: 138 –143). In a small number of cases the kind of representation of numeric values in SAS has resulted in wrong categorization due to a numeric representation error of differences. We corrected the simulation by using the round function of SAS in the calculation process with the same seeds as before. For Table 4 the value for the cut-off 2/3 changes from 0.180323 to 0.153494. For Table 5 the value for the cut-off 4/7 changes from 0.144729 to 0.139626 and the value for the cut-off 2/3 changes from 0.114885 to 0.101773. For Table 6 the value for the cut-off 4/7 changes from 0.125528 to 0.122144 and the value for the cut-off 2/3 changes from 0.099488 to 0.090828. The sentence on p. 141 “E.g. for block size 4 and q = 2/3 the type I error rate is 18% (Table 4).” has to be replaced by “E.g. for block size 4 and q = 2/3 the type I error rate is 15.3% (Table 4).”. There were only minor changes smaller than 0.03. These changes do not affect the interpretation of the results or our recommendations.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document