Statistics for significance of drugs....... - (Jul/08/2007 )

Hi all,
I am now facing a real diffculty in doing stats for my proj, and have to submit my thesis by this wednesday. heres my problem:

I have a new therapy for cancer. So i have done a dose response for the drug on cells. i have data for 8 different drug doses, and one vehicle control, one positive control, one negative control and blank. Now i need to perform statistics on these data. I have no idea what to do and how to go about. I have graphpad prism software, and i think i have to do ANOVA. can anyone tell me what is ANOVA and if it right to use it for my case, if not please clearly teach me how to go about the entire thing, PLEASE!!!!!!!!! Thanks to you all in advance.

I'm no expert I'm sorry, but I can tell you that ANOVA stands for analysis of variance, and I'm pretty sure it is acceptable to use in your case. I would also include a second test (like Mann-Whitney) as you are comparing multiple groups with the control and each other. I found a website which can do stats for you, you just enter your data.

see http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/VassarStats.html

I think there is also info on the site for what kind of stats to use and when.

goodluck

thank you so much... although my statistics skills are really horrible. now i know i need to do ANOVA for my entire data set along with my control. i need to know tha basics of what i am asked to do!! so can anyone tell me what is ANOVA and what is the exact meaning of standard deviation and std error in my expt??? please!!!! also how i go about doing the entire thing in excel or graphpad prism... thank you all....

Hi Molecular,

ANOVA is a comparison between groups. Say you have three groups and look at one variable (e.g. hemoglobin in controls, patients adn treated patients). You want to know if there are differences between these groups. You look at the mean hemoglobin and the standard deviation (a measure for the variance - are all the values near to the mean or are they far away). The analysis of variance ANOVA compares if the groups have an influence on the variance of your variable or if differences are just due to random scatter.
You can do all of your statistics in Prism. Prism comes along with some excellent handbooks (as pdf, just use the help function) which can easily explain everything you have to do in a way you will understand it.