COVID-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials?

A recently published trial of face mask use to protect against COVID-19 demonstrated a key barrier to carrying out randomised trials in public health: the need for unattainably large sample sizes. For many public health interventions, the choice is not between sufficiently powered trials and underpo...

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Autor principal: Fretheim, Atle
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Commentary
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8006114/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33781304
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13063-021-05209-5
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author Fretheim, Atle
author_facet Fretheim, Atle
author_sort Fretheim, Atle
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description A recently published trial of face mask use to protect against COVID-19 demonstrated a key barrier to carrying out randomised trials in public health: the need for unattainably large sample sizes. For many public health interventions, the choice is not between sufficiently powered trials and underpowered trials, but between underpowered trials and no trials at all. Underpowered trials should be viewed as contributions to the larger body of evidence, alongside other studies of various sizes and designs, collectively assessed and synthesized in systematic reviews. Overemphasis on sample size calculation is probably more of a hindrance than a help to scientific progress.
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spelling pubmed-80061142021-03-29 COVID-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials? Fretheim, Atle Trials Commentary A recently published trial of face mask use to protect against COVID-19 demonstrated a key barrier to carrying out randomised trials in public health: the need for unattainably large sample sizes. For many public health interventions, the choice is not between sufficiently powered trials and underpowered trials, but between underpowered trials and no trials at all. Underpowered trials should be viewed as contributions to the larger body of evidence, alongside other studies of various sizes and designs, collectively assessed and synthesized in systematic reviews. Overemphasis on sample size calculation is probably more of a hindrance than a help to scientific progress. BioMed Central 2021-03-29 /pmc/articles/PMC8006114/ /pubmed/33781304 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13063-021-05209-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Commentary
Fretheim, Atle
COVID-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials?
title COVID-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials?
title_full COVID-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials?
title_fullStr COVID-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials?
title_full_unstemmed COVID-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials?
title_short COVID-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials?
title_sort covid-19: underpowered randomised trials, or no randomised trials?
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8006114/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33781304
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13063-021-05209-5
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