Lynn Shaffer's Research Essentials
The essentials for interpreting research and statistics
Intention to treat (ITT) involves the statistical analysis of data from randomized clinical trials. At the beginning of their participation, patients are randomized to one of the trial interventions. Over the course of their participation, they may leave the group to which they were assigned – they may stop treatment altogether, start a treatment not…
What It Is Applies to randomized trials. Every effort is made to include data from all randomized patients in the statistical analysis, according to the group to which they were originally randomized. Why It’s Important Randomization assigns patients to groups based on chance, increasing the likelihood that the people across study groups are equivalent with…
Spoiler alert: not as much as we should at this point. I was going to write a more straightforward post but I was at an ob/gyn journal club a couple of days ago where we discussed a fairly recent article (Oct 2019) reporting on a randomized controlled trial meant to confirm the positive results of…