Neuroblastoma obeys 'The law of small numbers'

摘要

To the Editor: We noted that we would often see two to three cases of neuroblastoma at our center in a single month, and several months would pass until the next case occurred. Statisticians are extremely familiar with this pattern, first noted by the French mathematician Simeon Poisson in 1838. The "Poisson distribution" was best described by von Bortkiewicz, who was commissioned by the Czar to review army records and predict the likelihood of a Prussian cavalryman being killed by the kick of a horse in a given period of time. Von Bortkiewicz published a monograph ("The Law of Small Numbers"), which essentially demonstrated that an exponential relationship existed between rare independent events, and the time interval between those events occurring. Such events would therefore often occur clustered together, followed by long intervals of time with no events [1]. We retrospectively reviewed the incidence of patients with neuroblastoma at Albany Medical Center, between January 1, 2006 and December 31, 2010, to confirm that the presentation of these cases conformed to a Poisson distribution.