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Binary outcomes, such as mortality and myocardial infarction, are often viewed as most important to patients. However, outcomes that are expressed on a non-dichotomous scale such as quality of life, severity of depression or length of hospitalization, can also be critical to patients. For the purposes of this paper, all of the above examples will be referred to as continuous outcomes. While many binary outcomes are dichotomised from a continuous scale and in some cases can accommodate non-linear associations, such dichotomisation can also lead to loss of information. 1