Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology Aims & Scope
Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
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We read with great interest, the article by Lydersen, in which he summarised a number of issues indicated to authors as a statistical reviewer in the past.1 Although this article was published in 2015, it is still quite useful and instructive, especially in clinical research. However, we were concerned regarding the author’s advocacy of how to report summary statistics for continuous variables. He suggests using the mean rather than median to describe the statistics for all types of data with continuous distribution, citing an example of the advantage of possible integration in later meta-analyses. We agree that the median is very close to the mean in data with sufficiently large sample sizes according to the central limit theorem. However, for summary statistics of continuous data with an asymmetrical distribution, the median has been found to reflect the distribution more accurately than the mean, and the Strengthening the...
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Waki et al1 generally agree with my recommendations in ‘Statistical review: frequently given comments’.2 But they question my recommendation to generally report mean and SD rather than median and quartiles, also for non-normally continuous distributions. I am thankful for this opportunity to elaborate this issue more in depth. The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) guideline checklist does not specify recommendations regarding mean versus median for descriptive data. Waki et al refer to the STOBE guidelines as reported in Ref. 3, which comments the guidelines with more details, including the following recommendation on page 822: "We advise authors to summarize continuous variables for each study group by giving the mean and standard deviation, or when the data have an asymmetrical distribution, as is often the case, the median and percentile range (eg, 25th and 75th percentiles)." Similar advice is found...
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We read with great interest the article published by D’Silva et al.1 The authors reported three patients with inadequate antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 infection, two of whom received rituximab (RTX). Presence of antispike or antinucleocapsid IgG antibodies is strongly associated with reduced reinfection rates following the COVID-19.2 RTX is an anti-CD 20 monoclonal antibody that depletes B cells. Both T cell-dependent and T cell-independent immune responses against various infections agents are drastically reduced up to 6 months following RTX infusion.3 4 Here we report the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 infection in five patients with autoimmune rheumatic disease on RTX therapy. In our centre 224 patients with autoimmune rheumatic diseases had RT-PCR proven COVID-19 infection between March 2020 and December 2020. Of these, five patients had received RTX therapy within 18 months. The titres of IgG antibodies against Spike protein (anti-S) (VITROS immunodiagnostic...