Testing the Equality of the Intra‐Subject Treatment Covariance Matrices in a Crossover Study

In a 2 × 2 crossover bioavailability study, the sets of estimates of the pharmacokinetic parameters quite often have a symmetric covariance structure between the two treatments. For testing the equality of the intra‐subject covariance matrices for the two treatments in such studies, we suggest in this paper some statistical tests. When the response vectors are bivariate, we propose an exact test. Since the statistical procedures depend on the assumption of a symmetric covariance structure between the two treatments, we put forth some statistical tests for this assumption. We then apply the discussed tests to real data from a crossover bioavailability trial.