What is it about?
There are three obvious sources of variation în clinical trials: between patient, within patient and treatment by patient interaction. The third of these is what is relevant in personalising medicine. Life scientists have frequently failed to distinguish between these with the consequence that the size of the third of these has been assumed to be larger than it is and the opportunity for personalising medicine supposed greater than it is. A fourth source of variation, differences between physicians, is often ignored, but plausibly adds much variation to the system.
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Why is it important?
Explains the statistical issues concerning variation in response by simple arguments and graphical methods.
Perspectives
This article is a result of my frustration over many years with the failure of life scientists to understand components of variation. The issue has been a long-standing interest of mine but has become more important to my research as a result of my involvement in the IDEAL project on statistical issues developing treatments for rare diseases (funded by the EU FP7 programme gran number 602552)
Professor Stephen J Senn
Consultant Statistician
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This page is a summary of: Mastering variation: variance components and personalised medicine, Statistics in Medicine, September 2015, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/sim.6739.
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