Is the use of semicolon applicable anywhere in this sentence?
Here's the sentence -
On further statistical analysis, these benefits were found to be both short term (0-30 days) and long term (31-360 days) and in both STEMI and UA/NSTEMI patients, irrespective of whether PCI was done or not.
I was tempted to write this sentence in the following way:
On further statistical analysis, these benefits were found to be both short term (0-30 days) and long term (31-360 days), and in both STEMI and UA/NSTEMI patients; irrespective of whether PCI was done or not.
Any thoughts on what the right way is?
It is rather a mouthful as it stands (version 1), though not ungrammatical.
However, using a semicolon would not be standard, as you would not be separating into two complete sentences. People could probably (and would probably) argue over whether it is incorrect to leave a sentence fragment on one side of a semicolon, though most people accept sentence fragments as not incorrect per se.
Brackets tend to be an acceptable stratagem:
On further statistical analysis, these benefits were found to be both short term (0-30 days) and long term (31-360 days), and in both STEMI and UA/NSTEMI patients (irrespective of whether PCI was done or not).
However, the parenthesis could be seen as applying solely to the two classes of patients, so a second comma would be preferable here:
On further statistical analysis, these benefits were found to be both short term (0-30 days) and long term (31-360 days), and in both STEMI and UA/NSTEMI patients, irrespective of whether PCI was done or not.
For absolute disambiguation, re-ordering is preferable:
On further statistical analysis, irrespective of whether PCI was done or not these benefits were found to be both short term (0-30 days) and long term (31-360 days), and in both STEMI and UA/NSTEMI patients.