why does nobody talk about SELECT
Asking properly rather than in a comment on somebody else’s thread: why does nobody talk about SELECT.
Compared myself to a trial mean for about six months before realising the trial arm had dietitian contact every fortnight.
The discontinuation numbers were the most useful thing in the paper for me and they were in a supplementary table.
Went looking for the registered protocol to see whether the endpoint had changed. It had not, which was reassuring and worth checking.
Happy to answer the boring questions. Those are usually the ones worth asking.
best — the order this archive was captured in
discontinuation rate is a result, not a footnote
Started keeping the trial identifiers straight in a note file because I kept mixing up two programmes in the same sentence.
open-label extensions are not the same evidence as the randomised phase
Correction: SURMOUNT is the obesity programme and SURPASS is the diabetes one. The figure you quoted belongs to the other one.
Small fix — that was the cardiovascular outcomes trial, so weight was a secondary endpoint and the population was different.
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.
Push back: an open-label extension tells you about the people who stayed. That is a different question.
registry entry, protocol, publication — three different documents
read the endpoint before you read the headline
How long was the randomised phase before any extension?
Is that intention-to-treat or completers?
Yes — the interval is the finding. A point estimate with a wide interval is a hypothesis in a nice font.
That is a relative risk reduction. Quoting it without the absolute numbers overstates the case considerably.
- 1Push back: an open-label extension tells you about the people who stayed.…6 comments in this branch · started by u/week_four_wall