Patients with rheumatoid arthritis are at a greater risk of developing osteoporosis. The reasons are not well understood due to the difficulty in qualitatively assessing bone metabolism and mineral content. A researcher measures human calcitonin (HCT) levels in men with rheumatoid arthritis. The researcher randomly selects 43 men with rheumatoid arthritis and measured the mean HCT level of 33.8 pg/mL. Assume that HCT for individuals with rheumatoid arthritis follows a normal distribution with standard deviation σ = 23.6 pg/mL. Determine the margin of error for HCT levels.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
Patients with rheumatoid arthritis are at a greater risk of developing osteoporosis. The reasons are not well understood due to the difficulty in qualitatively assessing bone metabolism and mineral content. A researcher measures human calcitonin (HCT) levels in men with rheumatoid arthritis. The researcher randomly selects 43 men with rheumatoid arthritis and measured the mean HCT level of 33.8 pg/mL. Assume that HCT for individuals with rheumatoid arthritis follows a
Determine the margin of error for HCT levels.
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