Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care/research ethics
A study in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association, “Stopping Randomized Trials Early for Benefit and Estimation of Treatment Effects,” gives another troubling look at how inflated may be some of the claims about research findings.
One of the authors, Victor Montori, MD, of the Mayo Clinic, is quoted on a Mayo blog:
“.. almost everyone involved benefits from a trial ending early — doctors, researchers, funding sources,pharmaceutical firms, scientific journals, even reporters — everyone except the patient, who may end up receiving a therapy on the basis of misleading information about its benefits.”
He explains more on a YouTube video:
Overall, this was an easy-to-follow summary. But there was a clear difference between this and a competing Boston Globe story, which did a better job offering context and analysis.
This Boston Globe blog post gave its audience a more thorough understanding of an emerging approach to virtual colonoscopy than the Wall Street Journal.
Longer, but overall not any better, than the coverage from the competing LA Times story. Not thorough enough to explain what this preliminary research actually means for readers–which is not much at this point.
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