The apparently adverse effects become nonsignificant more readily for the two milder disciplinary tactics, most likely because of a differential selection bias, because they tend to be selected more often for milder types of misbehavior than the other corrective actions.
This crucial step was corroborated by Rubio et al. who have shown that 20 and 35 strips cause, respectively, minor and major increases in TEWL and that more strips have nonsignificant effect [ 42].
However, there were no statistically significant associations with other factors, the association with morningness/eveningness was not in the direction as predicted by theory and multi-metric analyses provided more support for (nonsignificant) small effects related to the different shiftwork factors.
More worrisome, a nonsignificant but consistent increase of the 28-day mortality was found in the first two trials conducted in intensive care – the Efficacy of Volume Substitution and Insulin Therapy in Severe Sepsis (VISEP) study [ 2] and the GluControl study [ 3].
However, as compared with the PNPAb patients, the PPAb group had significant higher APACHE II (P = 0.027) and SOFA scores (P = 0.02) at the onset of shock and had a more important but nonsignificant decrease of the cardiovascular SOFA score between day 1 and day 7 (P = 0.063).
Furthermore, the slightly higher control mortality rate reported by Schmidt et al. [1] for one of these six control treatments led to a more conservative outcome and nonsignificant differences to all except one of the three tested Bt toxin concentrations.
In this way, each module can be mutually nonsignificant with more than one other module.
In other words, gross errors more often rendered a nonsignificant result significant than vice versa.
Yet, in the second paragraph, they note that associations between optimism and cancer mortality are more generally weak or nonsignificant.
