We also briefly discuss important temporal considerations, including appropriate timing of sample collections for hormones with different time-courses of activation (e.g. ACTH vs. cortisol), the pharmacokinetics of both endogenous hormones and administered agents, and circadian considerations.
Even more concerning is the lack of agreement in the number or timing of sample collections.
The timing of sample collection was defined by highly variable clinical criteria.
We specifically focussed on how control samples were defined, taking into account age, gender, ethnicity, concomitant therapies, timing of sample collection and the criteria used to diagnose sepsis.
Most of the studies, which have been carried out in genetically informative samples, lack methodological consistency with regard to frequency and timing of sample collection.
Additionally, the detection of antibodies, including neutralizing antibody positivity, in an assay may be influenced by several factors including assay methodology, sample handling, timing of sample collection, concomitant medications, and underlying disease.
In this work, a new representation of sample size re-estimation design suggested by Cui et al. [5,6] is introduced as an adaptive group sequential design with flexible timing of sample size determination.
Despite these limitations, our study was stringent with respect to the standardized timing of sample collection and dietary intake (i.e., serum after a 12-h fast) as well as correlation with liver histological analysis.
In MnB, the majority of variance was found to be between subjects (94%), while in MnP and MnU the majority of variance was found to be within subjects (79% and 99%, respectively), even when controlling for timing of sample.
The contrasting results may be explained by variability in dengue serotypes and the timing of sample collection.
