Beyond Intention to Treat

Intention-to-treat principle.

Intention-to-Treat Comparison of Clinical Outcomes

Background Nonthoracotomy-implantable cardioverter/defibrillator (ICD) systems may represent a significant advance in the treatment of patients with life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias, but their merits relative to those of the wellestablished thoracotomy systems remain largely unknown. The objective of this study was to compare the shortand long-term clinical outcomes after attempted ICD ...

Intention-to-treat. What is the question?

It has become commonplace for Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) to be analyzed according to Intention-to-Treat (ITT) principles in which data from all subjects are used regardless of the subjects' adherence to protocol. While ITT analyses can provide useful information in some cases, they do not answer the question that motivates many RCTs, namely, whether the treatments differ in efficacy. I...

Beyond communicative intention*

While intentions are at the center of communication theories such as Relevance Theory, and also of theories of action in general, the interaction between communicative and non-communicative intentions has not been much investigated within the relevance-theoretic framework. This paper discusses Bratman’s (1987) Theory of Planning, which recognizes the critical role of intentions in governing our...

The role of intention-to-treat analyses in randomized trials.

To the Editor—Fritz et al recently examined 4 different approaches to eradicating Staphylococcus aureus carriage among patients with community-onset skin and soft-tissue infections (SSTIs). The increasing incidence of SSTIs—especially in the context of community-associated methicillin-resistant S. aureus—and the relative paucity of data on this subject make this an important investigation. The ...