Increasing Efficiency of Preclinical Research By Group Sequential Designs
Group sizes in preclinical research are seldom informed by statistical power considerations but rather are chosen on practicability [1, 2]. Typical sample sizes are small, around n = 8 per group (http://www.dcn.ed.ac.uk/camarades/), and are only sufficient to detect relatively large sizes of effects. Consequently, true positives are often missed (false negatives), and many statistically significant findings are due to chance (false positives).