WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF ESTABLISHING THE USUAL DOSE-RESPONSE CURVE?
The goal is to determine whether the clinical response (the variable reflected on the Y-axis of Figure 1) is a function of the dose (the variable expressed on the X-axis of Figure 1). In any such curve, the variable on the Y-axis is the dependent variable and the variable on the X-axis is the independent variable. One way to statistically test whether there is a functional relationship between these two variables is to do correlational statistics. In this statistical approach, the goal is to determine whether a statistically significant amount of the variability in the dependent variable is determined by the variability in the X-axis (e.g., drug dose or concentration). Since we are talking about variability, it is obvious that we are not talking about the response in a single patient at a single time but rather the variance in the response of different patients receiving the same dose at the same time under the same conditions or the variance in the response of the same patient but at
