Conventions change in scientific writing. Many years ago, it was usual to report clinical data as mean ?SEM (standard error of the mean). This produced impressively small "error bars" in graphic representations, but were often misleading, especially when dealing with small sample sizes. Most journals therefore urged a change to standard deviation (?SD), which has almost entirely replaced SEM in clinical reports. In the arrhythmia field, early implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) papers reported "hypothetical" deaths and "hypothetical arrhythmic deaths" based on the assumption that an ICD shock could be equated with a life saved.1 These terms fail to withstand scrutiny. A NASPE (HRS) position paper2 called for primary endpoints to be reported as total mortality ("dead or alive"), and this is now standard practice.
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