Clinical trials
Drugs or treatments will pass through several stages of clinical trial before they are approved for widespread use. This is because the best way to find out whether a treatment [...]
A recent article in the Daily Mail claimed that Protexo, a machine that filters out allergens in the air, could improve the quality of life of asthma sufferers by 15%. I decided to ‘ask for evidence’. I sought out the peer-reviewed original study, which analysed the effect of the Protexo machine on asthma sufferers, to find out whether this was true or whether the article could be giving asthmatics false hope through misleading statistics.
The study was published in the journal Thorax. It found through a randomised control trial that there was a 15% difference between the group using the machine and the placebo group in the number of people whose quality of life (determined by a questionnaire) was increased by 0.5 points or more. This is the smallest clinically significant value – so I’m not convinced when the Daily Mail article suggests that ‘the quality of life for those that used the machine was 15% better than those given a dummy machine’. It was good that I could find a paper on which the claims were based, but this story highlights the importance of precise phrasing when reporting the results of clinical trials.
Drugs or treatments will pass through several stages of clinical trial before they are approved for widespread use. This is because the best way to find out whether a treatment [...]
Every month there are dozens of news reports about medical breakthroughs and wonder drugs. The internet is cluttered with adverts and chat-room conversations testifying to ‘amazing’ benefits. [...]
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On his way home from work Alex was handed a flyer claiming private medication cost less than buying it from the NHS. He decided to #AskForEvidence [...]
Public expectations about screening don’t always match what screening programmes can deliver. The specific benefits of screening programmes and the sensitive calculation of these against possible harm have been largely [...]