Very interesting article studying clinical trials

Very interesting article studying clinical trials that used mortality as a primary endpoint. The author continues on to show that this is not a good choice for a number of reasons.

Good reading:

https://emcrit.org/pulmcrit/mortality/
https://emcrit.org/pulmcrit/mortality-2/

In the author's eyes, if leronlimab were able to overwhelmingly prove statistical significance with mortality as a primary endpoint, then leronlimab would join a very small number of clinical trials that were able to prove such - a total of 27 randomized controlled trials as of Feb 2020.

How about this comment from the article:

Quote:

---

Overview of mortality endpoint in critical care MC-RCTs
The overall picture is remarkable:

- 80% of MC-RCTs reported no difference in mortality endpoints.
- 20% of MC-RCTs detected a difference in mortality (either increased or decreased). Of these studies, 58% were unblinded. This raises concern that lack of blinding might inflate the likelihood of detecting mortality differences.
- 5% of MC-RCTs are expected to report mortality differences due purely to chance (using a standard p-value cutoff of <0.05). These spurious studies likely constitute a quarter of studies which were believed to reveal mortality differences!
- Zero medical therapies have ever been found to reduce mortality, in a robustly reproducible fashion.

---

This should stir up some lively discussion between some board members here.