High quality protocols facilitate proper conduct, reporting, and external review of clinical trials. However, the completeness of trial protocols is often inadequate. To help improve the content and… (More)
OBJECTIVE
Results of reliability and agreement studies are intended to provide information about the amount of error inherent in any diagnosis, score, or measurement. The level of reliability and… (More)
BACKGROUND
Placebo treatments have been reported to help patients with many diseases, but the quality of the evidence supporting this finding has not been rigorously evaluated.
METHODS
We conducted… (More)
The protocol of a clinical trial serves as the foundation for study planning, conduct, reporting, and appraisal. However, trial protocols and existing protocol guidelines vary greatly in content and… (More)
CONTEXT
Selective reporting of outcomes within published studies based on the nature or direction of their results has been widely suspected, but direct evidence of such bias is currently limited to… (More)
BACKGROUND
Placebo interventions are often claimed to improve patient-reported and observer-reported outcomes, but this belief is not based on evidence from randomised trials that compare placebo… (More)
OBJECTIVES
To study the analgesic effect of acupuncture and placebo acupuncture and to explore whether the type of the placebo acupuncture is associated with the estimated effect of acupuncture.
… (More)
BACKGROUND
Randomized trials without reported adequate allocation concealment have been shown to overestimate the benefit of experimental interventions. We investigated the robustness of conclusions… (More)
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate how often sample size calculations and methods of statistical analysis are pre-specified or changed in randomised trials.
DESIGN
Retrospective cohort study. Data source… (More)