Background: Blinding patients in clinical trials is a key methodological procedure, but the
expected degree of bias due to nonblinded patients on estimated treatment effects is unknown. …

Objective To compare the methodological quality and conclusions in Cochrane reviews with
those in industry supported meta-analyses and other meta-analyses of the same drugs. …

Background Randomized trials without reported adequate allocation concealment have
been shown to overestimate the benefit of experimental interventions. We investigated the …

Background: Clinical trials are commonly done without blinded outcome assessors despite
the risk of bias. We wanted to evaluate the effect of nonblinded outcome assessment on …

Objective To evaluate the impact of non-blinded outcome assessment on estimated treatment
effects in randomised clinical trials with binary outcomes. Design Systematic review of …

Background The minimum clinically important difference (MCID) is used to interpret the clinical
relevance of results reported by trials and meta-analyses as well as to plan sample sizes …

The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a popular measure of the
power of a (two-disease) diagnostic test, but it is shown here to be an inconsistent criterion: …

Objective To determine if the macrolide clarithromycin affects mortality and cardiovascular
morbidity in patients with stable coronary heart disease. Design Centrally randomised …

Regret is the difference in outcome between the action we took and the best action we could,
in retrospect, have taken. ‘Tent graphs’, representing decision problems under uncertainty …

The ‘integrated discrimination improvement’ (IDI) and the ‘net reclassification index’ (NRI) are
statistics proposed as measures of the incremental prognostic impact that a new biomarker …