Pediatric Migraine Headache, Essay Example

Before employing anintervention it is important to know it will be useful in treating the condition in question.In order to determine if a treatment is effective it is necessary to evaluate whether the treatment was truly superior to a control group or if the observed results were due solely to chance. The way this is done is through utilizing p-values.When chance can be ruled out, whatever effect is seen in the intervention group must be due to the treatment.The problem with evaluating the effects of an intervention by comparing a treatment group to a control group is that there are many thing that effect whether whatever difference observed is meaningful.Different p values may be set as the criteria for different types of studies.In health related research, p-values less than .05 are often used.

In this study, subjects were divided into two groups.On group received the treatment which was a system called “Headstrong,” a CD ROM which contained self-management strategies aimed at preventing or reducing migraine symptoms.The control group received a CD ROM which was educational.The two groups were compared at baseline prior to intervention, at post-intervention and at follow-up after 3 months.Results showed that the children inthe treatmentgroup reported significantly less migraine pain post-intervention (p = .03), while parents of children in the treatment group reported less child disability from headache pain at the three month follow-up(p = .04) compared to the control group. The other variable analyzed, which included migraine frequency, migraine duration and quality of life, showed no significant differences by group.It was concluded that the intervention was useful in treating some aspects of migraine headaches in children.

The reason it was concluded that the intervention was effective was that there were statistically significant differences between the treatment and control groups for two of the variable.This was determined because these two comparisons were shown to be significant based on p values at .03 and .04, both of which are below .05.Although p-values were not reported for the other variables, since it is stated no differences between the two groups were found at any of the measurement points, it can be assumed that the results showed none of the other comparisons were different at the .05 level.

Regression analysis is used when you want to use a variable or set of variables to predict an outcome variable. Significance for regression analysis is also determined through p values.One problem that simple linear regression analysis could be used to solve is whether optimismpredicts quality of life.In order to be able to determine this, both variablewould have to be measured.The values for the independent variable, optimism,would be used to predict the values for the dependent variable, quality of life.The results would be interpreted as the amount (percentage) of variance in quality of life that was accounted for by optimism.If the amount of variance accounted for was found to be significant at the .05 level (p <.05) it could be said that optimism was a meaningful predictor of quality of life and the outcome was not due to the effects of chance.