Clinical Trials & Surrogate Outcomes Looking for clinical relevance means looking for a lot of details.  A crucial part of that is looking at WHAT is compared with WHAT But what if a comparison is not clinically relevant  - what do you do then? And how about studies using surrogate outcomes perhaps even approved by the FDA - they must be clinically relevant - but are they? In this episode, we talk about how to navigate this and find the best available research You don’t want to miss this episode    Get the Precision Evidence Newsletter https://bit.ly/3tLBx3Z   ..read more

Addressing Clinical Relevance in Medical Papers Clinical trials and research should always aim to provide information that is meaningful and relevant for patients. In the last episode, we looked at how many - or rather - how few researchers mentioned and argued for what they would see as clinically relevant outcomes when setting up a study and listing it on clinicaltrials.gov In this episode, we go deeper to look at examples and why this is so important to improve the usefulness of the research   We want to make it mandatory to state the researchers' clinical relevance levels ahead of the ..read more

Clinical trials and research should always aim to provide information that is meaningful and relevant for patients. However, researchers are rarely addressing that topic when presenting results from trials. In this episode, we look at published papers from high-ranking journals to get a sense of the extent of that problem.  You may be surprised by our findings...   We want to make it mandatory to state the researchers' clinical relevance levels ahead of the trial, mentioning what they will consider clinically relevant when they pre-register their research on the clinicaltrials.gov ..read more

How to Get to Clinically Relevant Research The default method to evaluate clinical research is by statistical significance  Unfortunately is statistical significance not related to the meaningfulness of the findings in the research and thereby to its meaningfulness for patients and healthcare If researchers stated ahead of starting the trial what they would consider clinically relevant,  the reader could relate to that and agree or disagree with the researcher It would come from focusing on using the provided information to help patients and improve healthcare - and not just publishi ..read more

Russia's Sputnik COVID19 Vaccine Trial - Efficacy and Limitations The Russian Sputnik COVID19 vaccine interim analysis has been published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet Efficacy is comparable to vaccines like the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines But there are some serious concerns with the study and the published data reducing the usefulness of this vaccine and to whom it can be used You don’t want to miss this episode  GET THE ABSTRACT SCREENING TOOL It can be a challenge to screen papers for clinical relevance. As we go beyond the abstract in this podcast, we have c ..read more

Critical Appraisal of the Moderna COVID19 Vaccine Trial There is a big interest in clinical research now due to the Covid19 pandemic Especially the trails behind the Covid vaccines gain interest and is all over the news In this episode, we take a look at the published paper on the Moderna vaccine trial using our last episode of this podcast (#7) about the precision of the evidence We know from the news that the outcome in the Moderna vaccine trial is good with a reduction in risk at 94.1% by getting the vaccine But is the study as a whole clinically relevant and trustworthy? And how many peop ..read more

You’ve probably often heard that “Clinical trials show..” or “ evidence support that..” Unfortunately, a research paper being published in a peer-reviewed medical journal is NOT a guarantee that it is clinically relevant  - even if it is a high ranking journal As it is often the case the devil is in the details, so it is necessary to both read and evaluate the paper’s details and to put it into the context where you need the information In this episode, we will talk about the details you need to look for     GET THE ABSTRACT SCREENING TOOL It can be a challenge to screen paper ..read more

Covid-19 Vaccines Trials: Understanding the First Published Results #6 With massive awareness in the media, we now have some detailed information about the first of the Covid19 vaccine trials They differ in clinical usefulness The efficacy measures of 95% are widely mentioned, but let's be clear about what it means and how can we use that information In this episode, we go beyond the news coverage to find out and calculate how many persons need to be vaccinated to prevent one Covid19 infection both in general and for subgroups   GET THE ABSTRACT SCREENING TOOL It can be a challenge to s ..read more

Results from clinical trials should be published in medical papers and not evaluated from selected information in press releases We still need a lot of information from the trials to be able to have a clear picture of the efficacy and safety of the Covid-19 vaccines, let alone the precision and clinical relevance of the findings The information presented in the press releases are not sufficient to make calculations on risk But here is what you can find if you do it anyway   GET THE ABSTRACT SCREENING TOOL It can be a challenge to screen papers for clinical relevance. As we go beyond the ..read more

The world's currently largest randomized controlled trial (RCT) on Covid-19 protection by face masks is just published. The study showed a reduction in risk for Covid19 by using a facial mask  There are, however, severe limitations in this study and much more to mask-wearing than provided by this study, In this episode, we go beyond the abstract for the details.   GET THE ABSTRACT SCREENING TOOL It can be a challenge to screen papers for clinical relevance. As we go beyond the abstract in this podcast, we have created a screening tool you can use when reading an abstract from a cli ..read more