A pharmaceutical company has developed a new drug aimed at reducing the number of people affected by a particular disease. The current existing drug available on the market has a cure rate of 60%. However, before the pharmaceutical company can put the new drug on the market, the authorities need to be convinced that it is safe and more effective than the existing one. A trial is then set up. The new drug is given to 280 randomly selected patients who suffer from this disease. After the treatment, 196 people are cured. a) Is the new medicine more effective than the traditional one? Comment on your results. As a control group, 140 new patients who suffer from the same disease are selected at random but the patients in that group are given only (without knowing) vitamin C. After this “treatment” 70 people are cured. b) Is the vitamin worse than the traditional medicine in curing the disease? Comment on your results. c) On the basis of the evidence in part a) and part b) should the pharmaceutical company be allowed to put the new drug on the market?
Compound Probability
Compound probability can be defined as the probability of the two events which are independent. It can be defined as the multiplication of the probability of two events that are not dependent.
Tree diagram
Probability theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with the subject of probability. Although there are many different concepts of probability, probability theory expresses the definition mathematically through a series of axioms. Usually, these axioms express probability in terms of a probability space, which assigns a measure with values ranging from 0 to 1 to a set of outcomes known as the sample space. An event is a subset of these outcomes that is described.
Conditional Probability
By definition, the term probability is expressed as a part of mathematics where the chance of an event that may either occur or not is evaluated and expressed in numerical terms. The range of the value within which probability can be expressed is between 0 and 1. The higher the chance of an event occurring, the closer is its value to be 1. If the probability of an event is 1, it means that the event will happen under all considered circumstances. Similarly, if the probability is exactly 0, then no matter the situation, the event will never occur.
A pharmaceutical company has developed a new drug aimed at reducing the number of people affected by a particular disease. The current existing drug available on the market has a cure rate of 60%. However, before the pharmaceutical company can put the new drug on the market, the authorities need to be convinced that it is safe and more effective than the existing one. A trial is then set up. The new drug is given to 280 randomly selected patients who suffer from this disease. After the treatment, 196 people are cured.
a) Is the new medicine more effective than the traditional one? Comment on your results.
As a control group, 140 new patients who suffer from the same disease are selected at random but the patients in that group are given only (without knowing) vitamin C. After this “treatment” 70 people are cured.
b) Is the vitamin worse than the traditional medicine in curing the disease? Comment on your results.
c) On the basis of the evidence in part a) and part b) should the pharmaceutical company be allowed to put the new drug on the market?
Step by step
Solved in 3 steps
