Figure 1

The percentage of patients remaining in the study (i.e. who had not been discharged from hospital) on each day. N-acetylcysteine is shown by a dotted blue line and placebo by a solid red line. The life test procedure of SAS was used to compute nonparametric estimates of the length of stay function by the Kaplan-Meier method. Comparison between these functions was made using the Wilcoxon and log rank tests. Neither the log-rank statistic (p = 0.33) nor the Wilcoxon test (p = 0.30) were significant. The median length of stay was 6.0 days in the NAC group and 5.5 days in the placebo arm.