Targeted preventive interventions, adequate drug formulations, and treatment guidelines are needed to address the sizeable prevalence of malaria among young infants in malaria-endemic countries.
Rather than relying almost solely on medicine to improve health outcomes, we could look at alternative interventions: adequate housing for people who seek shelter in emergency departments, better nutrition for those suffering from diabetes, transportation services for older adults who can no longer drive to their medical appointments safely.
(3) Blinding of outcome assessment (possible detection bias) For chlamydia screening interventions, adequate descriptions of blinding of those assessing the outcomes are important.
Of course, nonpharmacological interventions (adequate calcium and vitamin D supply, regular exercise, the prevention of falls, smoking cessation, limited alcohol intake, etc) are also important.
Thus, the literature suggests that the dose and duration of intervention we used were adequate to induce changes in gene expression.
Allowing for potential loss to follow-up at 3 months, a sample size of 122 participants (61 intervention, 61 comparator) is adequate to find a reduction of 1.35 episodes of unprotected sex with a conventional two-sided α of 0.05 and 80% power (1−β).
In assessing study performance, four areas will be considered: (1) subjects: how recruited to the study; (2) intervention: adequate description of the intervention used for the treatment of patients; (3) data analysis: details of how the data were collected and analysed; (4) outcomes: inclusion of individual subject data or a statistical summary, details of missing results, drop outs.
Recommendations for future research include the need for longer term follow-up post-intervention, adequate control groups, sufficiently powered studies, and consideration of the social environment, which was identified as a significantly under-utilized resource in this area.
Factorial trials are most often powered to detect the main effects of interventions, since adequate power to detect plausible interactions requires greatly increased sample sizes.
It is possible, however, that correction of poor glycemic control by adequate interventions leads to prognostic improvement.
