Statistical analysis
Sample size calculations were made a priori to ensure that the study
would have enough power to detect statistical differences between groups
and can be found as supplementary material for the present work. The
power for these calculations was set in 80% and significance in 5%.
Demographic and clinical characteristics were presented in tabular form
using descriptive statistics (frequency, mean and standard deviation).
To analyse data recollected from objective (MHD and AMSMD) and
subjective tools (HIT-6, MIDAS and VAS) a descriptive test of the means
was conducted. Accordingly, repeated measures One-Way ANOVA test (RM
One-Way ANOVA) was used for parametric data and the repeated measures
ANOVA on the ranks test (RM ANOVA Ranks) for non-parametric data.
Post-hoc analysis was performed by using the Holm-Sidak test and only
when ANOVA indicated significance. Mean, standard deviation (SD) and
95% confidence interval (95% CI) were used to express these data and
the results represented in graphs were expressed as mean ± SD to be
comparable to CTs. Statistical analyses were performed with SigmaPlot
v11.0 (Systat Software Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) software.