Discuss the below:
Q: Heart disease patients often experience spasms of the coronary arteries. Because biological amines such as serotonin may play a role in these spasms, a research team measured serotonin levels post-mortem from patients who died of heart disease and from a control group that died of other causes. The data are summarized in the following table:
Serotonin level
Heart disease controls
Mean 3.840 5.310
Standard error 850 640
Number 8 12
a Do patients dying of heart disease have serotonin levels significantly different from patients dying of other causes? Justify your answer statistically at the 5% significance level. (Which test did you use? Are you justified in assuming that the variances of the two populations are equal?)
b Given the data, if you were told the serotonin level in the coronary arteries of a cadaver, could you make a fairly confident prediction of whether heart disease was involved? Explain.