Data of Merino sheep descended from two divergent selection lines for (H line) and against (L line) multiple rearing ability were collected in three different trials to compare response to stressful situations between lines.
In order to obtain a more definitive answer, the Lung Adjuvant Cisplatin Evaluation Biomarker (LACE-Bio) collaborative group undertook a pooled analysis of KRAS mutant vs. wild type patients in four different trials to ascertain if KRAS mutational status had an effect on patients who received adjuvant chemotherapy.
In this matching procedure trials were not used more than once, but the same participant could contribute different trials to both conditions.
The primary strengths of these criteria are simplicity, reproducibility, and universal acceptance, which allow outcomes across different trials to be compared.
Meta-regression, one of the methods used, aims to relate the treatment effect recorded in the different trials to the characteristics of those trials in which the study is the unit of analysis.
Improving CVD screening is only the first step in preventing cardiovascular disease and we need different trials to determine whether identified risk factors can be reduced by specialist or general interventions for people with SMI.
10 Also, to our knowledge, the question of tolerability and premature discontinuation of β blockers in chronic heart failure has not been investigated, except in isolated trials, so we decided to pool the data from different trials to assess the important question of tolerability and the discontinuation rates of different β blockers in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction.
Our approach using published data from the secondary prevention subgroups of the different trials to do the indirect comparison minimises the important inter-trial heterogeneity (especially for the ROCKET-AF trial), 8 9 10 thus allowing for some degree of homogeneity of study population for our indirect comparisons of the three novel anticoagulants.
In most of the Phase III studies which provide full evaluation of efficacy (measured by HbA1c) and tolerability/safety, a wide spectrum of patients is recruited into different trials to evaluate the new medication in various treatment combinations (from drug-naïve patients to those on a combination that includes insulin) and against various comparators (placebo or different active controls).
The appeals court may reverse parts of the decision and is likely to remand the case to a different trial judge to further flesh out some of these issues.
