unpopular opinion: most of what gets said here about hazard ratio is guesswork
unpopular opinion: most of what gets said here about hazard ratio is guesswork, which sounds obvious until you try to state the evidence for it.
Went looking for the registered protocol to see whether the endpoint had changed. It had not, which was reassuring and worth checking.
How to read one of these papers in fifteen minutes, in the order that actually helps.
Start with the registered protocol and check the primary endpoint against what is reported. Then the methods: who was included, what the comparator was, how long the randomised phase ran. Then the discontinuation numbers, which are a tolerability result and are usually in a supplementary table.
Only then the efficacy figure, and read the interval rather than the point estimate. Finish with the limitations section, which is where the authors say what they actually think.
Fifteen minutes, and you will know more than any thread summarising it.
Argued for a week about a result and then read the limitations section, which conceded most of my opponent’s point.
Not medical advice, obviously, and nothing here is approved for human use. One person with a spreadsheet.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Discontinuation rates are a tolerability result. A trial with a strong efficacy number and heavy discontinuation is telling you two things and people only quote one.
That is the 68-week readout, not the 72-week one. Different trial, different duration.
Cosigning on discontinuation. It is a result about tolerability and it gets buried every time.
Relative risk reduction without the baseline rate is uninterpretable. A large relative reduction on a small absolute risk is a small absolute benefit.
What did the confidence interval look like?
trial populations get support that nobody on this board gets
The press release said that; the publication says something more hedged. Worth reading both.
Do you have the publication or the press release?
Intention-to-treat analyses everybody randomised regardless of what they did afterwards. Completer analyses only those who finished. The second is systematically more flattering and both are legitimate if labelled.
FLOW was kidney outcomes and it is the one nobody quotes
Right — trial participants get structured support. Comparing yourself to a trial mean is comparing across two different interventions.
read the endpoint before you read the headline
Yes — the interval is the finding. A point estimate with a wide interval is a hypothesis in a nice font.
Correction: SURMOUNT is the obesity programme and SURPASS is the diabetes one. The figure you quoted belongs to the other one.
SURPASS is the diabetes programme and reports glycaemic endpoints
Quoted a figure here confidently, got asked whether it was ITT, went and checked, and it was not. Learned something.
Open-label extensions lose their randomisation. Anybody still enrolled at week 104 is a selected group and the numbers describe that group.
This. Intention-to-treat versus completer analysis routinely moves the headline by several points.
discontinuation rate is a result, not a footnote
the confidence interval is the finding, the point estimate is the headline
Same. A press release is a claim about a result; the publication is the result.
Retitled: the original quoted a diabetes endpoint as an obesity result.
Agreed. Half the arguments on this site are two people quoting different trials at each other without noticing.
Is that intention-to-treat or completers?
Agreed on comparators. "Superior" means nothing until you know superior to what and at what dose.
phase 2 finds a dose, phase 3 measures the effect
Which trial, and which arm?
A confidence interval is the range of effects compatible with the data. Two trials with overlapping intervals have not disagreed, whatever their point estimates look like next to each other.
SELECT was cardiovascular outcomes, not weight
- 1Same. A press release is a claim about a result; the publication is the…9 comments in this branch · started by u/yusuf_ramos
- 2Right — trial participants get structured support. Comparing yourself to a…6 comments in this branch · started by u/cold_chromatogram31