Throat swabs in children with respiratory tract infection: associations with clinical presentation and potential targets for point-of-care testing

Thornton, Hannah V; Hay, Alastair D; Redmond, Niamh M; Turnbull, Sophie L; Christensen, Hannah; Peters, Tim J; Leeming, John P; Lovering, Andrew; Vipond, Barry; Muir, Peter; Blair, Peter S

Continued along with recruitment of children who did not receive antibiotics, removed as far as possible any confounding effects of factors such as children's age, siblings, daycare attendance, household deprivation (14) and antimicrobial prescribing on microbe detection. These analyses should be regarded as exploratory; their multiplicity increases the risk of Type I error. We used adjusted p-values to reduce this risk, but if we were too stringent in this, we may have introduced Type II errors. Specific prior hypotheses regarding the associations explored would have helped target the analysis, but the absence of prior evidence in this area meant that this was necessarily an exploratory study. Additionally, the sample size of the follow-up study was not large enough to detect whether what appeared to be important variation in detection was in fact due to chance, and the low response rate may have led to a biased sample.