Respond to the following 2 posts:
1. I thoroughly enjoyed how you broke down the statistical tests into your specific t-test. I found it very easy to understand the layers of tests and the sub-groups by the way you explained the groupings. Regarding your question re: Congestive Heart Failure and patients being administered Spironolactone versus Furosemide; will you further break out Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction (HFpEF) to those with Heart Failure with Reduced Ejection Fraction (HFrEF)? I ask because the degree of ejection fraction that remains will also play a significant role in how quickly the patient Basic Naturietic Peptide (BNP) decreases. Additionally, will your research account for Potassium serum levels as Spironolactone is a potassium sparing distal renal tubule diuretic versus Furosemide which is a potassium removing loop diuretic. I am very interested to see what your research uncovers as this has great clinical applicability for patients with hyper and hypokalemia in the setting of heart failure with elevated BNP levels.
“B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) has prognostic significance in heart failure (HF), and reductions in BNP may predict clinical improvement, and short-term follow-up BNP and percent change in BNP level are significant prognostic factors of all-cause mortality” (Khanam et al., 2017).
Following an admission for acute heart failure, patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction have a similar rehospitalization burden to those with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. However, patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction are more likely to be readmitted for non-cardiovascular causes (Santas et al., 2017).
My initial thought was those patients with HFpEF (heart able to pump out normal amount of blood from Left Ventricle) would have a lower admission rate for Congestive Heart Failure exacerbation versus those patients with HFrEF as by definition their heart is not functioning or pumping blood to its fullest potential. I am eager to read your findings as I deal with CHF exacerbation patients with both rEF and pEF daily.
2. Statistical analysis is used in nursing research to study many different things in the medical field. It is used to study different forms of data such as trends, graphs, patterns, and different methods to compare and contrast different things. Quantitative data is most often used in statistical analysis. The one I want to talk about is the T-test in nursing research. “The t-test developed by William S. Gosset (also known as Student’s t-test and the two-sample t-test) is commonly used to compare one sample mean on a measure with another sample mean on the same measure. The outcome of the t-test is used to draw inferences about how different the samples are from each other. It is probably one of the most frequently relied upon statistics in inferential research.” (Jankowski, 2017) The level of measurement is “The t-test that healthcare and other researchers use today has two parts: a mathematical equation that provides a number or value (the t-statistic), and a table of all the possible results of that equation (all possible t-statistics). An example that could be used in nursing research using the t-test is lets say I my friends and I are skateboarding, and we all fall and get similar abrasions on our knees. 3 of them decide to use antibiotic ointment and I do not. Their wounds end up healing much faster than mine. We could do a t-test and use the mean data of each of the wound healing, and measure the amount of days until they were all completely healed and compare the data afterwards.
