Introduction Threshold analysis is a novel statistical approach which can be used to investigate direct comparisons in network meta-analysis (NMA) have estimated relative effects that may not robust changes the evidence, either due possible bias, sampling variation, or relevance. Methods In health technology assessment of clinical effectiveness ablative and non-invasive therapies for patients w...

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is regarded as one of the most valued research methodologies for examining the efficacy or effectiveness of interventions.1 Randomized trials are most often associated with studies of drug effectiveness; however, they have also been successfully applied to research questions related to provision of care by pharmacists.2-5 This article is not intended to be ...

BACKGROUND Recent evidence has highlighted deficiencies in clinical trial protocols, having implications for many groups. Existing guidelines for randomized clinical trial (RCT) protocol content vary substantially and most do not describe systematic methodology for their development. As one of three prespecified steps for the systematic development of a guideline for trial protocol content, the...

Background: Despite the reduction of infant mortality in the world, complication of preterm birth is a major cause of infant mortality. The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of abdominal massage and non-nutritive sucking on physiological parameters of preterm infants in neonatal intensive care units in Emam Reza Hospital in Kermanshah, Iran. Materials and Methods: In this randomized co...

Clinical evidence available for the assessment of medical devices (MDs) is frequently insufficient. New MDs should be subjected to high quality clinical studies to demonstrate their benefit to patients. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the study design reaching the highest level of evidence in order to demonstrate the efficacy of a new MD. However, the clinical context of some MDs makes...

to identify the antidiabetic plants of iran, a systematic review of the published literature on the efficacy of iranian medicinal plant for glucose control in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus was conducted. we performed an electronic literature search of medline, science direct, scopus, proquest, ebsco, googlescholar, sid, cochrane library database, from 1966 up to june 2010. the search t...

BACKGROUND Since the introduction of randomized controlled trials (RCT) in clinical research, there has been discussion of whether enrolled patients have worse or better outcomes than comparable non-participants. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether very preterm infants randomized to a placebo group in an RCT have equivalent neurodevelopmental outcomes to infants who were eligible but not randomi...

BACKGROUND Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) that use patient-specific data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) are popular, yet such CEAs are criticized because they neglect to incorporate evidence external to the trial. A popular method for quantifying uncertainty in a RCT-based CEA is the bootstrap. The objective of the present study was to further expand the bootstrap method of RCT-ba...

BACKGROUND It is often difficult to enrol healthy volunteers into a randomized controlled trial (RCT) as there are barriers to participants' proper understanding of a trial. This study aimed to evaluate degrees of understanding of the informed consent (IC) process among healthy volunteers who participated in an RCT. Additionally, factors associated with degree of understanding were investigated...

Hussein Hollands, MD, MS (epid) Peter J. Kertes, MD, CM, FRCS(C) The purpose of this review article is to outline a few concepts that are useful for interpreting the results of a randomized clinical trial (RCT). Specifically, we will focus on measures of the size of a treatment effect— relative risk ratio (RRR), absolute risk ratio, and number needed to treat (NNT). These concepts are important...