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A Randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote, Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit—Correction
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160:1878.
Errors in Results. In the Original Investigation titled "A Randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote, Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit," published in the October 25, 1999, issue of the ARCHIVES (1999;159:2273-2278), the authors, Harris et al, were prompted by questions raised in postpublication correspondence to reevaluate their calculations and feel that 2 points need to be clarified. In Table 3 of their article, a percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty procedure (PTCA) with a stent and/or a rotablator appeared to count as one event. However, when they calculated the unweighted score, they gave one point for PTCA and an additional point for stent and one for rotablator when these occurred in the same patient. Thus, a patient receiving all 3 procedures was given 3 points, not 1, as was implied in Table 3. Second, the need for a cardiovascular stress test (such as a thallium test or an echocardiogram) was included in the calculation of the Mid American Heart Institute–Cardiac Care Unit (MAHI-CCU) scores but was omitted from Tables 1 and 3 of their article. There were 44 of these events in the usual care group (8.4%) and 26 (5.6%) in the prayer group (P=.11). The following tabulation clarifies how Harris et al arrived at the scores reported in Table 4:
In the calculation of the weighted MAHI-CCU score, the need for cardiovascular stress tests was ranked as a category 4 event; if reclassified as a category 2 event, the mean±SEM scores become 6.97±0.26 for the usual care group and 6.24±0.26 for the prayer group (P=.05); the effect size remains 10% to 11%.
In Table 4, the number of patients in the Usual Care Group was incorrectly reported as "(n=52)"; it should have been "(n=524)."
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Retroactive prayer: lots of history, not much mystery, and no science
Bishop and Stenger
BMJ 2004;329:1444-1446.
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