Surrogate end points: hopes and perils

Surrogate end points: hopes and perils.

In recent years, the cost of drug development has increased the demands on efficiency in the selection of suitable drug candidates; surrogate end points have emerged to improve this process, hoping that they can help reduce duration and cost of clinical trials. Additionally, they can help in solving ethical issues when measuring the clinical end point involves the application of risky or uncomf...

Upper gastrointestinal bleeding and surrogate end points.

Use of Surrogate end points in HTA

The different actors involved in health system decision-making and regulation have to deal with the question which are valid parameters to assess the health value of health technologies.So called surrogate endpoints represent in the best case preliminary steps in the casual chain leading to the relevant outcome (e. g. mortality, morbidity) and are not usually directly perceptible by patients. S...

Surrogate end points in heart failure.

Because of the increasing number of pharmacologic strategies available for treatment of heart failure (HF), the time has come to reassess the adequacy of end points used to evaluate therapeutic efficacy. Interest in the use of surrogate end points in clinical studies is increasing. A surrogate end point is defined as a measurement that can substitute for a true end point for the purpose of comp...

The perils of surrogate endpoints.

Our goals in medicine are (i) to improve the quality of patients’ lives, (ii) help them to live longer, and (iii) to do so at a reasonable cost. These are our true endpoints: health status, survival, and cost. It is thus entirely consistent with this point of view that these are the fundamental concepts that can be united in a formal cost–utility analysis. These endpoints remain the best measur...