Conclusion Should Shun the Cloud of Confusion

Excerpt

Sir, we have read the article “Randomized control clinical trial of overnight fasting to clear fluid feeding 2 hours prior anesthesia and surgery” by Joshi et al. with interest [1]. This study was planned with the premise that a short interval of preoperative fasting will be beneficial to the patients undergoing elective surgical intervention under general anesthesia (GA). The primary objective of the study was to measure the volume of gastric contents by transabdominal ultrasonogram just prior to intubation. Measuring the pH of gastric contents obtained through nasogastric aspiration immediate post intubation was the secondary objective. The primary and secondary objectives are essential for formulating the null and the alternate hypothesis of any clinical trial. Both the hypotheses should contradict each other, i.e., if the null hypothesis suggests that the test and control groups have similar outcome then the alternate hypothesis should propose a difference in outcome between the two groups. The hypothesis statements in this study appears perplexing as both the null and the alternate hypothesis are similar in terms of finding “no difference in the value of gastric pH” in the test and the control groups. …