The potential impact on quality of life, survival, and cirrhosis-related morbidity, particularly variceal bleeding, justifies the performance of such a trial.
Inter-rater agreement is a crucial aspect in the planning and performance of a clinical trial in which the main assessment tool is the clinical interview.
The performance of a clinical trial for pharmaceutical agents is usually undertaken only after there is likely benefit demonstrated from the use of the putative agent.
This perceived low priority of SDD could act as a major challenge to SDD implementation or to the performance of a future trial.
Decision analysis techniques can offer an alternative method for answering clinical questions when performance of a clinical trial is not feasible (Brauer and Waters 2007).
However, a period of years would be required to accumulate a sufficient number of patients from one rheumatologist, and resources for performance of a multicentre trial have not been available.
This lack of accepted clinical endpoints makes standardization of study results difficult, and results in significant difficulties for the successful performance of a clinical trial for novel therapeutics for lupus.
The in vitro presented results, if confirmed in other institutions, in conjunction with anecdotal clinical data, should encourage the performance of a clinical trial of sufficient size to compare co-trimoxazole to vancomycin in treating MRSA infections.
If also observed in other institutions, these findings should encourage the performance of a clinical trial of sufficient size to compare co-trimoxazole to vancomycin in treating MRSA infections.
Under these conditions (optimal for successful performance of a multicentre trial) the primary outcome variable, namely 90-day mortality, was found to be increased from 24.9% in the conventional/control group arm to 27.5% in the intensive treatment arm, which is in complete contrast to the findings of the Leuven I trial.
