How many total deaths occurred in the study?

How many total deaths occurred in the study?

• A. 450
• B. 93
• C. 361
• D. 89

Answer: (B)

The key idea here is how to get a total event count from study data: you add up all deaths reported across every study group. Deaths are the events you tally to get the overall mortality in the study, and you should count only actual deaths, not participants lost to follow-up, and avoid double-counting if a death appears more than once in the text or tables. In this case, when you sum the deaths reported for each arm, you get 93, which is the total number of deaths in the study. For intuition, if one arm had, say, 40 deaths and the other had 53, that would give a total of 93. The other numbers don’t fit because they don’t match the total mortality across all arms as reported in the results.

The key idea here is how to get a total event count from study data: you add up all deaths reported across every study group. Deaths are the events you tally to get the overall mortality in the study, and you should count only actual deaths, not participants lost to follow-up, and avoid double-counting if a death appears more than once in the text or tables. In this case, when you sum the deaths reported for each arm, you get 93, which is the total number of deaths in the study. For intuition, if one arm had, say, 40 deaths and the other had 53, that would give a total of 93. The other numbers don’t fit because they don’t match the total mortality across all arms as reported in the results.