Estimands and assumptions in clinical trials

Today I listened to a great Royal Statistical Society webinar, with Alan Phillips and Peter Diggle (current RSS president) presenting. The topic was a particularly hot one in the clinical trials world right now, namely estimands.

Alan’s presentation gave an excellent overview of the work of a PSI/EFSPI special interest group on estimands. Topics discussed included defining exactly what is meant by an estimand, whether there should be a standardised set of estimands which could be used across trials conducted in different disciplines, and what the estimand discussion means in terms of implementation and statistical analysis.

Read more

Estimating effects when outcomes are truncated by death

A common situation arises when one wants to estimate the effect of a treatment or exposure at some time point t in an observational cohort or randomised trial. For example, what is the mean difference in some outcome Y at time t between the two groups of interest. To make things a bit simpler, let’s suppose that subjects were allocated to the two groups (e.g. two treatments A and B) randomly, as in a randomised trial. Now suppose that some of the subjects die before time t, such that their outcome Y is not observed. Then we can no longer compare Y between the two groups in all subjects, because some values of Y are missing, or truncated by death.

Read more

Matching analysis to design: stratified randomization in trials

Yesterday I was re-reading the recent nice articles by Brennan Kahan and Tim Morris on how to analyse trials which use stratified randomization. Stratified randomization is commonly used in trials, and involves randomizing in a certain way to ensure that the treatments are assigned in a balanced way within strata defined by chosen baseline covariates.

Read more