Skip Navigation

Electronic Letters to:

Qualitative Research:
Birgitte Schoenmakers, Frank Buntinx, and Jan De Lepeleire
Can pharmacological treatment of behavioural disturbances in elderly patients with dementia lower the burden of their family caregiver?
Fam. Pract. 2009; 26: 279-286 [Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]
*E-letters: Submit a response to this article

Electronic letters published:

[Read eLetter] Scientific writing and editorial scrutiny
Johannes C van der Wouden   (14 September 2009)

Scientific writing and editorial scrutiny 14 September 2009
Top
Johannes C van der Wouden,
senior lecturer
Department of General Practice, Erasmus MC, PO Box 2040, 3000 CA Rotterdam, NL

Send e-letter to journal:
Re: Scientific writing and editorial scrutiny

Dear editor, Scientific writing is a craft, aimed at producing papers that are easy to read and understandable for the intended audience. If not, appropriate editorial coaching should raise the endproduct to an acceptable level. I was surprised by the confusing and conflicting information provided in the paper by Schoenmakers et al in the August issue.(1) The abstract tells us that the burden for the caregiver of demented elderly was lowered by 0.27, but the unit of measurement is unclear. Are these pounds, kilogrammes or something else? Table 2 seems to provide more information on this issue, and this seems to tell us that the unit of measurement is SMD. I wonder how many of your readers know that SMD stands for Standardised Mean Difference and is expressed in the proportion of (pooled) standard deviation.(2) A minimum of 0.5 is generally accepted as clinically relevant, and 0.27 is considerably less. However, the anchor numbers on the X-axis of Figure 2 (from an impressively precise 30.7045 on the left hand side to an almost as impressive 163.842 on the right hand size) do not include the value of 0.27 for the pooled estimate, so either the figure or the estimate is probably incorrect.

Johannes C van der Wouden, senior lecturer Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Department of General Practice email: j.vanderwouden@erasmusmc.nl

References 1. Schoenmakers B, Buntinx F, De Lepeleire J. Can pharmacological treatment of behaviouraldistrubances in elderly patients with dementia lower the burden of their family caregiver? Fam Pract 2009; 26: 279-86. 2. Higgins JPT, Green S (editors). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 5.0.1 [updated September 2008]. The Cochrane Collaboration, 2008. Available from www.cochrane-handbook.org.

Conflict of Interest:

None declared