Resumo

ARPAJON PENA, Yunier  e  SOSA PEREZ, Ana Ludys. Procedures for the confidence interval estimation in biomedical research studies. Rev Cubana Angiol Cir Vasc [online]. 2015, vol.16, n.1, pp. 92-100. ISSN 1682-0037.

In all biomedical research studies, daily clinical and epidemiological reports are made, so it is necessary to know perfectly well what should be reported and how to do it. The objective of this paper was to describe the advantages of the estimation of the confidence intervals for the right interpretation of results in the scientific research studies. A review of textbooks of biostatistics and statistics for health care was made in addition to scientific articles collected in Scielo, MedLine and PubMed and published from 2004 to 2014. For the search in electronic databases, the used subject headings were confidence intervals, health statistics, point estimators and hypothesis comparisons. In most of the reviewed documents, we found that the best way of presenting the statistical significance of the results is through the 95% confidence intervals. The most used methods for their estimations in descriptive, inferential, clinical and epidemiological research studies were presented in this paper. The confidence intervals estimation is a solid and easy-to-apply method, provides greater robustness to any research analysis since it evaluates the range in which the real value probably lies, and therefore, allows making better interpretation and application of the results.

Palavras-chave : confidence intervals; health statistics; point estimators; hypothesis comparison.

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