In following the practice of evidence-based medicine, when faced with a question about prevention or treatment the clinician should seek out the best evidence that addresses the question. If quality of evidence is considered a pyramid, what category should be placed at the peak? One dogma argues that it is the best-conducted randomized clinical trial (RCT) comprising patients similar to those s...

BACKGROUND Iron deficiency is the most common preventable nutrition problem in developing countries. Several randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have been conducted to determine the effectiveness of various iron dosing schemes in multiple settings. OBJECTIVE The objective was to determine whether enough is known about iron metabolism to predict hemoglobin and serum ferritin (SF) concentrations ...

BACKGROUND Norwegian Psychomotor Physiotherapy (NPMP) has been an established treatment approach for more than 50 years, although mostly in the Scandinavian countries, and is usually applied to patients with widespread and long-lasting musculoskeletal pain and/or psychosomatic disorders. Few studies have been investigating outcome of NPMP and no randomized clinical trials (RCT) have been system...

The renowned Canadian physician and McGill alumnus got it right. Much of medical science over the past century has documented intra-and inter-individual variability, however the rationale for this variability is not well understood and not often applied in clinical practice. Indeed most therapeutic strategies rely on data derived from randomized clinical trials (RCTs) and large observational st...

The importance of preventing and treating incomplete data in effectiveness studies is nowadays emphasized. However, most of the publications focus on randomized clinical trials (RCT). One flexible technique for statistical inference with missing data is multiple imputation (MI). Since methods such as MI rely on the assumption of missing data being at random (MAR), a sensitivity analysis for tes...

'Intention-to-treat' (ITT) analysis is the recommended approach for the data analysis of randomized clinical trials (RCT). ITT analysis considers patients in the active or in the control arm as originally allocated by randomization, independently of their actual adherence to the assigned treatment. Lag-censoring analysis is a statistical method which takes into account the compliance of patient...

A composite end point is often used as the primary end point to assess the efficacy of a new treatment in randomized clinical trials. In cardiovascular trials, the often rare event of the relevant primary end point (individual or composite), such as cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or both, is combined with a more common secondary end point, such as target lesion revascularization, ...

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an 8-week training that is designed to teach participants mindful awareness of the present moment. In randomized clinical trials (RCTs), MBSR has demonstrated efficacy in various conditions including reducing chronic pain-related distress and improving quality of life in healthy individuals. There have, however, been no qualitative studies investigat...

PURPOSE To systematically review the methodologic quality of, and summarize the evidence from trials examining the effectiveness of physical exercise in improving the level of physical functioning and psychological well-being of cancer patients during and after medical treatment. METHODS Thirty-four randomized clinical trials (RCTs) and controlled clinical trials were identified, reviewed for...

Evidence-based medicine is a current paradigm of practicing and teaching clinical medicine. This concept is widely believed to optimize clinical decision making by using the evidence derived from high-quality medical research, in particular from randomized clinical trials (RCTs) and their meta-analyses, as they are associated with a lower risk of bias compared with observational studies. Howeve...