Misleading Reporting in Statistically Not Significant Oncology Trials-Joining Efforts Toward Unbiased Results Interpretation

Yichen Zhang, Xiaodong Guan
2021
Over the past decades, randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have gradually been accepted as the criterion standard to test the efficacy and safety of new treatments. Results from RCTs are widely used to inform regulatory approvals and clinical practices. To enable assessments of the validity of their results and conclusions, an RCT report should provide comprehensive information on its design, conduct, and analysis objectively. Previous approaches to reporting RCT results revealed many
more » ... , including a methodological discrepancy between noninferiority and superiority trials. The Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) checklist 6 and its adapted version were developed for reporting different trials and have been widely adopted as a requirement by peer-reviewed medical journals. 1 Yet, spin, the distortion or misrepresentation of interpretation of the results, remains in many scientific writings, especially in RCTs with primary outcomes that are not statistically significant. 2
doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.38695 pmid:34874408 fatcat:j3nkqhotdbc4zc7x43fjbso6km