Error rates for the following scenarios: equally sized trials; one small trial, 1/10th of other trials; 50 50% small and large trials (ratio 1 10); one large trial (10 times larger than other trials).
The ratio of systematic reviews over the published clinical trials (ratio SR/RCT) of biomarkers and non-biomarkers are shown in the solid line and dotted line of Figure 4 respectively.
We considered other approaches and also did more traditional meta-analyses, comparing treatment arms within each trial after treatment and calculating ratios between the three arms before these ratios were pooled, but as the denominators of the per trial ratios had a distribution that crossed zero, these ratios were very unstable because of "division almost by zero" effects.
Stern and Simes found that the risk of publication bias tended to be greater for clinical trials (odds ratio 3.13, 95% CI: 1.76 to 5.58) than other studies (for all quantitative studies odds ratio 2.32, 95% CI: 1.47 to 3.66).
Pretreatment was not associated with a significant lower risk of mortality in all patients (odds ratio 0.90 (95% confidence interval 0.75 to 1.07), P=0.24), in particular when considering only the randomized controlled trials (odds ratio 0.90 (0.71 to 1.14), P=0.39).
But after 10,000 trials, the ratio grows to achieve 96 and 92%, respectively.
We couldn't find the significant difference between the first trial and the subsequent 9 trials in ratio of offers and acceptance rates.
Stern et al [4] reported that this finding was even stronger for their subgroup of clinical trials (Hazard Ratio (HR) 3.13 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.76, 5.58), p = 0.0001) compared to all quantitative studies (HR 2.32 (95% CI 1.47, 3.66), p = 0.0003).
Recently, a hierarchical approach to defining a composite endpoint for CV trials (win ratio method) has been described [ 1].
As observed in the GO-FORWARD trial, atherogenic ratios were also stable among the treatment groups in GO-BEFORE.
