Yes, exactly. Control groups are incredibly important for ensuring good quality of clinical studies. It's a technique that solves multiple "calibration" problems, including:
- being able to draw causal conclusions
- being able to adjust against placebo effects
A lot of clever people have tried to come up with ways of doing away with control groups. But ultimately, the best we can achieve is to stop early, as soon as the trial has a clear outcome. I do perhaps think this has become more common in recent times though, so perhaps the study you were involved in was at a time when early stopping wasn't really "the done thing".
But it still beats "studies" done 100 years ago, when you might give someone a cough mixture, see that they improved (if they died, let's just ignore that), and conclude that it was the cough mixture that did it!
> the best we can achieve is to stop early, as soon as the trial has a clear outcome
That must be really hard: if you wait for 95% confidence, you are selecting for 5% noise. If you repeatedly re-measure for 95% confidence, you strongly select for random noise.
Not many medical advancements provide such an anomalously strong signal (98% survival versus 30% survival).
No, in fact it is quite common to do "open label" clinical studies in which patients know what drug they are getting and no one is given the current standard of care. This is especially common in cancer, where the standard of care is so poor, and in rare diseases, where the patient population isn't large enough to admit such a comprehensive study.
It is harder to have the same statistical confidence of efficacy and safety in such studies, but clinical researchers try to address those issues by varying e.g. dosage quantities, time in between doses, etc.
Source: place I work is currently doing studies of this nature, and in general such studies seem to be well-understood and accepted by the FDA.
Randomization is independent from blinding. Open label studies can be either randomized or not, and controlled or not.
The FDA will usually push for blinding if possible (sometimes it is not). They will also usually push for a randomization zed control with standard of care. They way the FDA views it (and I agree), is that control patients are not harmed because they are still getting the same care they would outside of the trial.
It is usually unethical to have a treatment free arm. However, this has its own problem, where if you keep using equivalence comparisons, the end of the chain might not actually be any better
For such a large effect it is quite possible to implement an adaptive trial design with unbalanced arms and interim analysis for efficacy. But you have to ask for this, the FDA will not necessarily suggest it directly.
funklute|3 years ago
- being able to draw causal conclusions
- being able to adjust against placebo effects
A lot of clever people have tried to come up with ways of doing away with control groups. But ultimately, the best we can achieve is to stop early, as soon as the trial has a clear outcome. I do perhaps think this has become more common in recent times though, so perhaps the study you were involved in was at a time when early stopping wasn't really "the done thing".
But it still beats "studies" done 100 years ago, when you might give someone a cough mixture, see that they improved (if they died, let's just ignore that), and conclude that it was the cough mixture that did it!
robocat|3 years ago
That must be really hard: if you wait for 95% confidence, you are selecting for 5% noise. If you repeatedly re-measure for 95% confidence, you strongly select for random noise.
Not many medical advancements provide such an anomalously strong signal (98% survival versus 30% survival).
anthuswilliams|3 years ago
It is harder to have the same statistical confidence of efficacy and safety in such studies, but clinical researchers try to address those issues by varying e.g. dosage quantities, time in between doses, etc.
Source: place I work is currently doing studies of this nature, and in general such studies seem to be well-understood and accepted by the FDA.
s1artibartfast|3 years ago
The FDA will usually push for blinding if possible (sometimes it is not). They will also usually push for a randomization zed control with standard of care. They way the FDA views it (and I agree), is that control patients are not harmed because they are still getting the same care they would outside of the trial.
It is usually unethical to have a treatment free arm. However, this has its own problem, where if you keep using equivalence comparisons, the end of the chain might not actually be any better
tsbischof|3 years ago