scholarly journals Association of End Point Definition and Randomized Clinical Trial Duration in Clinical Trials of Schizophrenia Medications

2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (10) ◽  
pp. 1064
Author(s):  
Islam R. Younis ◽  
Mathangi Gopalakrishnan ◽  
Mitchell Mathis ◽  
Mehul Mehta ◽  
Ramana Uppoor ◽  
...  
2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (17) ◽  
pp. 2439-2442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward L. Korn ◽  
Boris Freidlin ◽  
Jeffrey S. Abrams

We review how overall survival (OS) comparisons should be interpreted with increasing availability of effective therapies that can be given subsequently to the treatment assigned in a randomized clinical trial (RCT). We examine in detail how effective subsequent therapies influence OS comparisons under varying conditions in RCTs. A subsequent therapy given after tumor progression (or relapse) in an RCT that works better in the standard arm than the experimental arm will lead to a smaller OS difference (possibly no difference) than one would see if the subsequent therapy was not available. Subsequent treatments that are equally effective in the treatment arms would not be expected to affect the absolute OS benefit of the experimental treatment but will make the relative improvement in OS smaller. In trials in which control arm patients cross over to the experimental treatment after their condition worsens, a smaller OS difference could be observed than one would see without cross-overs. In particular, use of cross-over designs in the first definitive evaluation of a new agent in a given disease compromises the ability to assess clinical benefit. In disease settings in which there is not an intermediate end point that directly measures clinical benefit, OS should be the primary end point of an RCT. The observed difference in OS should be considered the measure of clinical benefit to the patients, regardless of subsequent therapies, provided that the subsequent therapies used in both treatment arms follow the current standard of care.


2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Litchfield ◽  
Jenny Freeman ◽  
Henrik Schou ◽  
Mark Elsley ◽  
Robert Fuller ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-616
Author(s):  
Dun-Xian Tan ◽  
Russel J Reiter

SARS-CoV-2 has ravaged the population of the world for two years. Scientists have not yet identified an effective therapy to reduce the mortality of severe COVID-19 patients. In a single-center, open-label, randomized clinical trial, it was observed that melatonin treatment lowered the mortality rate by 93% in severely-infected COVID-19 patients compared with the control group (see below). This is seemingly the first report to show such a huge mortality reduction in severe COVID-19 infected individuals with a simple treatment. If this observation is confirmed by more rigorous clinical trials, melatonin could become an important weapon to combat this pandemic.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmette Hutchison ◽  
Sreenath Nampally ◽  
Imran Khan Neelufer ◽  
Youyi Zhang ◽  
Jim Weatherall ◽  
...  

The amount of time and resources invested in bringing novel therapeutics to market has increased year over year with fewer successful treatments reaching patients. In the lifecycle of drug development, the clinical phase is a major contributor to this decreasing efficiency in the development of clinical trials. One major barrier to the successful execution of a randomized control trial (RCT) is the attrition of patients who no longer participate in a trial either following enrollment or randomization. To address this problem, we have assembled a unique dataset by integrating multiple public databases including ClinicalTrials.gov and Aggregate Analysis of ClincalTrials.gov (AACT) to assemble a trial sponsor-independent dataset. This data spans 20 years of clinical trials and over 1 million patients (3,175 cohorts consisting of 1,020,085 patients and 79 curated features) in the respiratory domain and enabled a data-driven approach to identify top features influencing patient attrition in a trial. Top Features included Duration of Trial, Duration of Treatment, Indication, and Number of Adverse Events. We evaluated multiple machine learning models and found the best performance on the Test Set with Random Forest (Test subset: n=637 cohorts; RMSE 6.64). We envisage that our work will enable clinical trial sponsors to optimize trial run time by better anticipating and correcting for potential patient attrition using patient-centric strategies to improve patient engagement, thus enabling new therapies to be delivered to patients more quickly.


2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edson Duarte Moreira ◽  
Ezra Susser

In observational studies, identification of associations within particular subgroups is the usual method of investigation. As an exploratory method, it is the bread and butter of epidemiological research. Nearly everything that has been learned in epidemiology has been derived from the analysis of subgroups. In a randomized clinical trial, the entire purpose is the comparison of the test subjects and the controls, and when there is particular interest in the results of treatment in a certain section of trial participants, a subgroup analysis is performed. These subgroups are examined to see if they are liable to a greater benefit or risk from treatment. Thus, analyzing patient subsets is a natural part of the process of improving therapeutic knowledge through clinical trials. Nevertheless, the reliability of subgroup analysis can often be poor because of problems of multiplicity and limitations in the numbers of patients studied. The naive interpretation of the results of such examinations is a cause of great confusion in the therapeutic literature. We emphasize the need for readers to be aware that inferences based on comparisons between subgroups in randomized clinical trials should be approached more cautiously than those based on the main comparison. That is, subgroup analysis results derived from a sound clinical trial are not necessarily valid; one must not jump to conclusions and accept the validity of subgroup analysis results without an appropriate judgment.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 622-623
Author(s):  
NIGEL PANETH ◽  
SYLVAN WALLENSTEIN

The therapeutic trial comparing extracorporeal membrane oxygenation with conventional treatment in neonatal respiratory failure reported by Bartlett et al (Pediatrics 1985;76:479-487) uses a method of comparing treatments unlikely to be familiar to most pediatricians. Known as the "randomized play the winner" method, it has thus far been little used in clinical research. Most clinical investigators consider the conventional randomized clinical trial to be the last word in treatment comparisons. But randomized clinical trials are costly, cumbersome, and to some observers less than ideal ethically. The ethical problem arises from the fact that during a "successful" randomized clinical trial (ie, one that demonstrates a significant advantage to one treatment) about half of the trial subjects will receive a treatment which, at the end of the trial, will be known to be inferior.


2011 ◽  
pp. 1738-1758
Author(s):  
Tillal Eldabi ◽  
Robert D. Macredie ◽  
Ray J. Paul

This chapter reports on the use of simulation in supporting decision-making about what data to collect in a randomized clinical trial (RCT). We show how simulation also allows the identification of critical variables in the RCT by measuring their effects on the simulation model’s “behavior.” Healthcare systems pose many of the challenges, including difficulty in understanding the system being studied, uncertainty over which data to collect, and problems of communication between problem owners. In this chapter we show how simulation also allows the identification of critical variables in the RCT by measuring their effects on the simulation model’s “behavior.” The experience of developing the simulation model leads us to suggest simple but extremely valuable lessons. The first relates to the inclusion of stakeholders in the modeling process and the accessibility of the resulting models. The ownership and confidence felt by stakeholders in our case is, we feel, extremely important and may provide an example to others developing models.


2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ames

When we manage our patients both they and we would like to know that the interventions we prescribe have been tested and shown to be safe and effective for the uses to which they are put. The most powerful tool to determine the utility of specific interventions in the discipline of medicine is the double-blind placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial (RCT). Some of the complex problems encountered in psychogeriatrics do not lend themselves to straightforward yes or no outcomes, and some of the multifaceted interventions developed for the management of common psychogeriatric syndromes are difficult to test using standard RCT design, especially with regard to effective blinding and appropriate control conditions (Llewellyn-Jones et al. 1999; Haynes, 1999; Ames, 1999). Nevertheless, there are specific interventions for which RCT data have been very useful in refining treatment guidelines and advice (e.g. Doody et al., 2001) and, where this is the appropriate trial design, RCTs comprise the “gold standard” by which to assess the efficacy of a treatment or “management package”.


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