Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

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What Is This “Dispersion Index?"

I’ve been looking at slide 12 of this presentation and can’t make much sense of it, can you help me out? If anyone else likes to reply that’s cool too!
https://www.anavex.com/_files/ugd/7b494c_66761ab69d6e4c2b905d5377eb3005f0.pdf

Page 12 of the Anavex PDF is titled, “Confirmed Reliable Inter-Individual Variability (Dispersion) for the ANAVEX2-73 Phase 2a Study with 32 Patient Cohort.”

Further, it is stated that, “Evaluation of the dispersion index of all the 32 patient[s] of the Phase 2a reveals that above 16 patients, the dispersion index is maintained at a fixed level with the narrowest confidence intervals.”

What might all of this mean? Whatever is “inter-individual variability (dispersion)?”

From another paper, here’s one helpful statement:

“In contrast to individual cognitive performance, the dispersion index is thought to provide an indicator of fairly stable endogenous factors, such as central nervous system (CNS) integrity (MacDonald et al., 2006, 2009), and to be less influenced by situation-dependent factors including fluctuations in stress or sleep (Hultsch et al., 2000).”
[From, De Felice S and Holland CA (2018), Intra-Individual Variability Across Fluid Cognition Can Reveal Qualitatively Different Cognitive Styles of the Aging Brain. Front. Psychol. 9:1973. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01973]

In essence the dispersion index in this clinical study indicates, at “the narrowest confidence levels,” that blarcamesine maintained “central nervous system (CNS) integrity,” “less influenced by situation-dependent factors including fluctuations in stress or sleep.”

The take away? Even though there were a small number of patients (only 32), the results were not randomly variable, and most importantly, were predictive of results that would emerge from a study with a larger cohort (larger number of patients). The page text makes that claim, that the dispersion index of this small study “allows for meaningful predictions for larger populations.”

As always before, the data and results from every clinical test of blarcamesine, even Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials, are accurately predictive of subsequent Phase 3 trials. The data from the big Phase 3 Alzheimer's clinical trial are going to be exceptionally positive.