One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) compares the means of multiple groups, such as patients with different types of sickle cell disease. ANOVA assesses how much of the overall variation in the data is explained by differences in group means versus differences within groups. If the between-groups variation is large compared to the within-groups variation, then the group means are likely different. ANOVA extends the two-sample t-test to compare more than two groups and provides an F-statistic to test the hypothesis that all group means are equal. Key assumptions are normality of data and equal variances across groups.