A question jumped out at me when reading these results. I should caveat this by emphasizing that I am very much not an expert in this kind of evaluation and this question may be naive.
Is there any seasonal effect on mortality in Malawi? If so, is it ok for the pre-intervention period to be 12-months while the post-intervention period is 18-months?
Apologies for a belated response. You are correct that there are quite large seasonal influences. So we matched everything with the respective months in the same period to compensate for it. 2 weeks ago we also got the individual patient level data. This data shows that the post-intervention group was actually on average in a worse condition than the pre-intervention group. If this is taking into account the mortality reduction is close to 50%.
A question jumped out at me when reading these results. I should caveat this by emphasizing that I am very much not an expert in this kind of evaluation and this question may be naive.
Is there any seasonal effect on mortality in Malawi? If so, is it ok for the pre-intervention period to be 12-months while the post-intervention period is 18-months?
Hi Toby,
Apologies for a belated response. You are correct that there are quite large seasonal influences. So we matched everything with the respective months in the same period to compensate for it. 2 weeks ago we also got the individual patient level data. This data shows that the post-intervention group was actually on average in a worse condition than the pre-intervention group. If this is taking into account the mortality reduction is close to 50%.
Regards,
Niek