[Readout] SELECT: MACE HR 0.80, and the absolute numbers people skip
SELECT: MACE HR 0.80, and the absolute numbers people skip — a position I have arrived at slowly and would like tested.
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.
Would rather be corrected in public than confident in private.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Retitled: the original quoted a diabetes endpoint as an obesity result.
On means, which this board treats as targets and which are nothing of the sort.
A reported mean body weight change is the centre of a distribution that in these trials is very wide. Substantial numbers of participants did much better, and substantial numbers did considerably worse while remaining on the drug and in the analysis.
Quoting the mean as an expectation therefore misleads in both directions: it makes ordinary results look like failures and it makes exceptional results look normal. If a paper publishes the distribution — and several do, in the appendix — look at that instead. It is far more informative than the number in the abstract.
Which trial, and which arm?
Do you have the publication or the press release?
Is that intention-to-treat or completers?
intention to treat versus completers changes the number substantially
That is the 68-week readout, not the 72-week one. Different trial, different duration.
check who the comparator was before you compare anything
Absolute or relative risk reduction?
How long was the randomised phase before any extension?
Agreed. Half the arguments on this site are two people quoting different trials at each other without noticing.
That is a relative risk reduction. Quoting it without the absolute numbers overstates the case considerably.
That is a relative risk reduction.
Agreed. And the interval, not the point estimate, is what the trial actually established.
Spent an evening with the appendix tables and found the subgroup detail that the entire thread had been speculating about.
- 1Is that intention-to-treat or completers?10 comments in this branch · started by u/hub_ops