This gets cited here weekly, usually second-hand, so it is worth setting out what it does and does not establish.
Relative and absolute effects need reading together. A 20% relative reduction on a high baseline risk is a large absolute benefit; the same relative figure on a low baseline risk is a small one, and press summaries almost always quote the relative number because it is bigger.
Where I think it is weakest: the follow-up is short relative to how long people actually take these drugs, so durability is an assumption here rather than a finding.
The question I want answered is how to read a result like this without either dismissing it or over-reading it, since the summaries all read like press releases. I would rather have one careful answer than five confident ones.
Figures above are from the primary publication rather than the press summary. If a number here disagrees with one you have, post yours and we will work out which of us is reading a secondary source.
MASHdoc_SA said:Relative and absolute effects need reading together.
No disagreement with MASHdoc_SA. One condition attached. The gap between trial results and real-world results is consistent and it is not fraud. Trial participants get titration by protocol, scheduled contact, free drug and dietetic support; removing that infrastructure costs a few percentage points every time it has been measured. When your own curve sits below the published mean, that is the likeliest explanation before anything about you or your material.
MASHdoc_SA said:Relative and absolute effects need reading together.
Filing a mild objection. Mild because I might be wrong; an objection because nobody has addressed the case that does not fit. I would add the less popular caveat: these trial populations under-represented several groups, older adults and the highest BMI categories among them. The results probably generalise, and "probably" should be stated as an assumption rather than dropped.
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Shop Reference StandardsShort answer first, then the reasoning. Read four things before the headline number. The population, because trial populations are selected and supported in ways that real cohorts are not. The comparator, because "better than placebo" and "better than the current standard" are different claims and get reported identically. The primary endpoint as pre-registered, because a secondary endpoint promoted after the fact is a hypothesis rather than a finding. And the completion rate, because a large effect in the half of participants who finished is a different result from a large effect in everybody enrolled.
NurseKim_ATL said:The gap between trial results and real-world results is consistent and it is not fraud.
Agreed, and ALT falling is not the same as fibrosis improving. Enzymes are a crude proxy; FIB-4 or elastography is what tells you about the thing that matters.