A comparison of several tests for drug synergy
Minta Wu, Robert F. Woolson · Communications in Statistics - Simulation and Computation · 1998
Statistical approaches for assessment of synergism have been widely used in pharmacological settings to identify beneficial drug combinations. Several commonly used approaches for synergy assessment are studied in this paper. Each of the methods studied can be related to the isobole-based definition of additivity (Berenbaum, 1989). A Monte Carlo study is conducted in which both significance levels and powers for the five methods are estimated and compared. Based on the results from the simulation study, two approaches due to Finney (1971b) perform similarly, with high power and acceptable significance levels. In addition, a global overall test of synergism from the modified Kelly and Rice (1990) method for larger sample sizes and an approach due to Carter et al. (1988) perform well in terms of estimated Type I error rate.