A medical student is reviewing the charts of patients who have been hospitalized to the local emergency department with severe pancreatitis. He wants to compare blood glucose levels in moderate and severe instances. He chooses to do a descriptive study of the factors in each group before attempting to compare the mean blood glucose levels between the two groups of patients. The distribution of blood glucose levels in patients with severe acute pancreatitis was found to be strongly positively skewed. Which of the following statements about the data for the severe acute pancreatitis group is most likely correct?

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Eductional Objective: The symmetrical bell-shaped curve is usually cited as the prototypical curve describing the distribution of a continuous variable. However, in actual research scenarios, continuous variables often have asymmetrical distributions. When a distribution curve is asymmetric, it is either positively or negatively skewed:
In general, in a positively skewed distribution, the mean is the most shifted in the positive direction, followed by the median and then the mode (mode < median < mean). In such a situation, the median often reflects a central tendency better than the mean does.

A Medical Student Is Reviewing the Charts of Patients Who