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Issues in the determination of “responders” and “non-responders” in physiological research

Atkinson, Greg; Williamson, Philip; Batterham, Alan M

Authors

Greg Atkinson

Philip Williamson

Alan M Batterham



Abstract

As a follow-up to our 2015 review, we cover more issues on the topic of “response heterogeneity”, which we define as clinically-important individual differences in the physiological responses to the same treatment or intervention that cannot be attributed to random within-subjects variability. We highlight various pitfalls with the common practice of counting the number of “responders”, “non-responders” and “adverse responders” in samples that have been given certain treatments/interventions for research purposes. We focus on the classical parallel-group randomised controlled trial (RCT) design and assume typical good practice in trial design.
We show that sample responder counts are biased because individuals differ in terms of pre-to-post within-subjects random variability in the study outcome(s) and not necessarily treatment response. Ironically, sample differences in responder counts may be explained wholly by sample differences in mean response, even if there is no response heterogeneity at all. Sample comparisons of responder counts also have relatively low statistical precision. These problems do not depend on how the response threshold has been selected, e.g. on the basis of a measurement error statistic, and are not rectified fully by the use of confidence intervals for individual responses in the sample.

Citation

Atkinson, G., Williamson, P., & Batterham, A. M. (2019). Issues in the determination of “responders” and “non-responders” in physiological research. Experimental Physiology, 104(8), 1215-1225. https://doi.org/10.1113/EP087712

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 20, 2019
Online Publication Date May 22, 2019
Publication Date Aug 1, 2019
Deposit Date May 22, 2019
Publicly Available Date May 23, 2020
Print ISSN 1469-445X
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 104
Issue 8
Pages 1215-1225
DOI https://doi.org/10.1113/EP087712
Keywords Response heterogeneity; Inter-individual differences; Standard deviation; Responders; Within-subject random variability
Public URL https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/1830183
Publisher URL https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/EP087712

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