To bias or not to bias in oncology clinical trials: Perspectives on design, endpoint selection, and reporting

Bias in reporting of randomised clinical trials in oncology.

BACKGROUND Bias in reporting efficacy and toxicity in clinical trials may impact treatment decisions. Here, we report quality of reporting of efficacy and of toxicity in articles describing randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of cancer therapy and the association between biased reporting and study results, funding and financial relationships of the authors with the sponsor. MATERIALS AND METH...

Psychophysics of remembering: to bias or not to bias.

Delayed matching to sample is typically a two-alternative forced-choice procedure with two sample stimuli. In this task the effects of varying the probability of reinforcers for correct choices and the resulting receiver operating characteristic are symmetrical. A version of the task where a sample is present on some trials and absent on others is analogous to a yes/no recognition task. We desc...

Selection Bias in reporting the prevalence of Transfusion Transmitted Infection Diseases in Iranian Hemophiliacs

Selection bias in clinical stroke trials depending on ability to consent

BACKGROUND Clinical trials are the hallmark of evidence-based medicine, but recruitment is often challenging, especially in stroke trials investigating patients not being able to give informed consent. In some nations, ethics committees will not approve of inclusion in a clinical study via consent of a legal representative. The ethical dilemma of including or excluding those patients has not be...

To Adjust or Not to Adjust? Sensitivity Analysis of M-Bias and Butterfly-Bias

M-Bias,” as it is called in the epidemiologic literature, is the bias introduced by conditioning on a pretreatment covariate due to a particular “M-Structure” between two latent factors, an observed treatment, an outcome, and a “collider.” This potential source of bias, which can occur even when the treatment and the outcome are not confounded, has been a source of considerable controversy. We ...