Trials of treatment are needed before trials of screening

Evaluation of Clinical Trials

In a number of important clinical issues such as evaluation of the efficacy or effectiveness of therapeutic or preventive interventions as well as for comparing the harms of interventions, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide the highest levels of evidence, either directly or indirectly. It is obvious that critical appraisal of these studies to assess their validity and precision is of p...

Age, Body Mass Index, and Number of Previous Trials: Are They Prognosticators of Intra-Uterine-Insemination for Infertility Treatment?

Initial treatment of HIV infection: randomized trials with clinical end points are still needed.

Potential conflicts of interest: M.D.H. currently has consultancy agreements for work as a member of data and safety monitoring committees with Boehringer Ingelheim and Tibotec, companies that have anti-HIV products. In this issue of the Journal, results from a major collaboration of 12 cohort stud-ies—the Antiretroviral Treatment Cohort Collaboration (ART-CC)—are presented, comparing rates of ...

Low-dose naltrexone for treatment of multiple sclerosis: clinical trials are needed.

TO THE EDITOR: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is generally thought to be an autoimmune disease. Current estimates suggest that there are up to 400 000 patients diagnosed with MS in the US.1 In all forms of MS, both inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes affect the disease. After receiving several questions regarding the use of low-dose naltrexone for MS, I performed a search of MEDLINE (1966-May...

Characteristics of Clinical Trials in Iran: A Sample of 5000 Trials Registered in IRCT

Background and Objectives: A considerable number of clinical trials are conducted in Iran each year. Not much is known about the characteristics of them, this study aimed to investigate key characteristics of Iranian clinical trials.   Methods: All clinical trial protocols registered in IRCT until November 2013 were selected. Text mining techniques were used to extract information from data t...