We therefore sought to investigate how decisions of withholding/withdrawing life-sustaining therapies are addressed in randomized controlled trials in critically ill patients.
Whether a pharmacological increase in CI and SvO2 improves the overall outcome in human septic shock treated with vasopressin analogues should be addressed in randomized controlled clinical trials.
Not all items are applicable to all studies, e.g., as some items can only be addressed in randomized controlled trials, they will always have a higher level of evidence.
Regarding the present data, one might speculate that selenium supplementation might improve survival and/or clinical course of patients after successful CPR, but this has to be addressed in randomized controlled trials.
The trials provide a model for designing response-guided treatment algorithms in other malignancies, such as lung, head and neck and ovarian cancer, for which induction treatment has a potential role and the algorithms need to be addressed in randomized phase III trials.
This question cannot feasibly be addressed in randomized controlled trials, because the focus of such trials is on direct comparison of two regimens rather than on comparison of one regimen at different times during the course of a patient's disease.
This issue has been addressed in a randomized trial, reported in abstract form.
A possible association between mRNA and protein expression of RRM2 or the RRM2B subunit and the effect of gemcitabine is less well studied and has not been addressed in properly sized randomized trials and results from pilot trials are inconsistent [ 10, 14- 18].
Issues of study design have been addressed in terms of combining randomized trials and observational studies in evaluating preventive interventions such as Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccination (Colditz et al., 1994) and mammography screening (Desmissie et al., 1998).
