Quantile Treatment Effect of Zinc Lozenges on Common Cold Duration: A Novel Approach to Analyze the Effect of Treatment on Illness Duration.

ABSTRACT: Calculation of the difference of means is the most common approach when analyzing treatment effects on continuous outcomes. Nevertheless, it is possible that the treatment has a different effect on patients who have a lower value of the outcome compared with patients who have a greater value of the outcome. The estimation of quantile treatment effects (QTEs) allows the analysis of treatment effects over the entire distribution of a continuous outcome, such as the duration of illness or the duration of hospital stay. Furthermore, most of these outcomes have asymmetric distributions with fat tails, and censored observations are not uncommon. These features can be accounted for in the analysis of the QTE. In this paper, we use the QTE approach to analyze the effect of zinc lozenges on common

SUBMITTER: Hemila H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8844493 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature