Departures from community equipoise may lead to incorrect inference in randomized trials

Equipoise in Clinical Trials

“Do you have equipoise?” The question was simple, yet loaded with challenges. We were being invited to participate in a prospective randomized controlled phase 3 trial testing whether acute endovascular stroke therapy can be beneficial for patients presenting beyond 6 hours from symptom onset (≤6 hours is the currently accepted therapeutic time window for mechanical thrombectomy) when using per...

Does clinical equipoise apply to cluster randomized trials in health research?

This article is part of a series of papers examining ethical issues in cluster randomized trials (CRTs) in health research. In the introductory paper in this series, Weijer and colleagues set out six areas of inquiry that must be addressed if the cluster trial is to be set on a firm ethical foundation. This paper addresses the third of the questions posed, namely, does clinical equipoise apply ...

Causal inference from randomized trials in social epidemiology.

Social epidemiology is the study of relations between social factors and health status in populations. Although recent decades have witnessed a rapid development of this research program in scope and sophistication, causal inference has proven to be a persistent dilemma due to the natural assignment of exposure level based on unmeasured attributes of individuals, which may lead to substantial c...

Blindness in Randomized Controlled Trials

In combination with randomization, blinding or masking is an important factor in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), particularly in trials that assess therapeutic effects. Here an attempt is made to explain blindness and why it is important. In clinical trials, blinding is defined as the condition imposed on a study in which study participants, health care providers and assessors collecting o...

Causal Inference in Randomized Trials with Noncompliance