julia.endo said:Read four things before the headline number.
Pushing back on julia.endo here. I would add the less popular caveat: these trial populations under-represented several groups, older adults and the highest BMI categories among them. The results probably generalise, and "probably" should be stated as an assumption rather than dropped.
I would rather be corrected than agreed with, if it comes to it.
One concrete data point for the thread. A quick sanity check on any figure quoted here: is it mean or median, is it intention-to-treat or completers, and what was the comparator. Three questions, and they resolve most disagreements in these threads.
Worth separating that from the trial evidence, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.
Ask again with the specifics and you will get a better answer than this one.
PharmD_Rodriguez said:I would add the less popular caveat: these trial populations under-represented several groups, older adults and the highest BMI categories among them.
Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. Relative and absolute effects need reading together. A 20% relative reduction on a high baseline risk is a large absolute benefit; the same relative figure on a low baseline risk is a small one, and press summaries almost always quote the relative number because it is bigger.
I would rather be corrected than agreed with, if it comes to it.
Sigma-Aldrich — Research-Grade Standards
Certified reference materials, analytical reagents, and research-grade standards for peptide verification. Trusted by laboratories worldwide.
Shop Reference StandardsFollowing on from LondonLisa — and this may be the naive question:
How to read a result like this without either dismissing it or over-reading it, since the summaries all read like press releases?
OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.
Follow-up: I read the paper rather than the summary and the qualifier I was missing was in the second paragraph of the results.