49 The industry's tendency to trial its products against weaker alternatives may skew the nature of the available evidence and introduce potential asymmetries; however, doing so does not mean that the trial results themselves are biased.
The tendency of clinical trials to focus on cardiovascular disease in type 2 DM (as opposed to type 1 DM) in spite of the fact that the age-adjusted relative risk for cardiovascular disease in type 1 DM far exceeds that of type 2 DM has resulted in an under-appreciated link between type 1 DM and cardiac disease [ 15].
However, traditional analyses mostly use the viewing tendency of participants over trials (e.g., average fixation proportions to visual referents), rather than individual fixation patterns within trials (e.g., consecutive fixations across visual referents).
Whilst measuring the central tendency of the group across trials reduces the problems of interdependency of the data and type-two clustering errors [34], the cost is a substantial reduction in statistical power.
Indeed, the tendency of published industry sponsored trials to have positive results that favor the experimental drug has even been seen in arthritis trials.
The results of the Barcelona trial even suggested a tendency of higher cancer-related survival and OS rate for the laparoscopic group after a median follow-up of 95 months [3].
Generalizability of trial results.
Reporting bias proceeds from the tendency of researchers, pharmaceutical companies and journals to publish trial results based on the direction, magnitude and statistical significance of the results [ 1, 2].
After the computation of central tendencies for the different types of trials, researchers typically calculate an approach avoidance tendencies index that represents the relative strength of the corresponding action tendencies.
Another issue is the well-known tendency of σ DL 2 to underestimate the between-trial variance [ 7, 8, 22].
The difference between trial efficacy and clinical effectiveness can be ascribed to the tendency of patients not to adhere to therapy, especially in the longer term.
