1 00:00:01,920 --> 00:00:08,850 Welcome to everyone. My name is Rafael PEREIRA, a medical statistician working in the Department of Primary Health Care. 2 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:12,360 I've been involved with the centre for the last five years, I think. 3 00:00:12,870 --> 00:00:20,670 And today we're going to be talking mainly about rapid critical appraisal, particularly of controlled trials, 4 00:00:21,780 --> 00:00:29,700 which is sort of the second or third step of your evidence based medicine steps. 5 00:00:30,240 --> 00:00:35,340 So before I go into this, I hope you all received an envelope with something in it. 6 00:00:35,850 --> 00:00:42,840 Please keep it short. Don't open it. The second thing I if you haven't, please ask only for one. 7 00:00:43,710 --> 00:00:44,550 If you haven't got one, 8 00:00:44,850 --> 00:00:55,110 second thing I need you to have is to have your workbooks because we're going to do a bit of work that involves reading and appraising. 9 00:00:56,060 --> 00:01:02,370 You have it with you ask, all evolve has some spare copies as well that you can borrow if there's loads and those of you. 10 00:01:02,400 --> 00:01:06,600 Then I'll ask you to work in groups of two or three. 11 00:01:09,180 --> 00:01:13,800 All right. I'll need a lot of patient, patient participant participation. 12 00:01:14,250 --> 00:01:25,080 Okay. So as Paul mentioned earlier on, we're really looking at five different steps in the evidence based medicine to do evidence based medicine. 13 00:01:26,280 --> 00:01:29,600 Mike is on the OC. 14 00:01:30,030 --> 00:01:33,630 Is the mike on the slide? 15 00:01:34,020 --> 00:01:37,380 Can you hear me now? I'll predict, I hope. 16 00:01:38,340 --> 00:01:46,130 Okay. Paul has mentioned or mentioned in the morning that the five different steps of evidence based medicine, 17 00:01:46,350 --> 00:01:50,129 the first to formulating an answerable question and tracking down the best evidence. 18 00:01:50,130 --> 00:01:59,580 The first one, sorry, was mentioned at the beginning of the first plenary session and was also part of the group sessions right now. 19 00:02:00,480 --> 00:02:03,660 The second step tracking down the best evidence will be done this afternoon. 20 00:02:03,840 --> 00:02:10,530 Okay. Today, we're going to right now we're going to be focusing mainly on critically appraising the evidence for the 21 00:02:10,530 --> 00:02:15,240 validity of the evidence that we find with the studies that we we've identified are actually valid, 22 00:02:15,510 --> 00:02:18,960 the impact of the size of the benefit. And finally, the applicability. 23 00:02:19,110 --> 00:02:24,060 Well, the findings that we have in this particular study can be applied in our setting. 24 00:02:27,670 --> 00:02:32,440 Now, when we're looking at using evidence based medicine, generally, 25 00:02:32,440 --> 00:02:41,680 we think of a series of items that we need to check and decide whether they're actually there or not. 26 00:02:42,070 --> 00:02:46,260 To define it, these particular studies are actually useful or not. 27 00:02:46,270 --> 00:02:50,860 So if you type a critical appraisal checklist and randomised controlled trials in Google, 28 00:02:51,190 --> 00:03:00,610 as you can see you get in 2005, you get 36,000 articles going up massively, 2006 it's getting a little bit better. 29 00:03:00,610 --> 00:03:09,640 By 2008 we only have 97,000 articles that proposed different checklist of doing critical appraisal of randomised controlled trials. 30 00:03:09,940 --> 00:03:15,399 And this is a sort of a typical checklist with 20 different items that you go 31 00:03:15,400 --> 00:03:18,700 from the beginning to the end with your trial and with your study in hand, 32 00:03:18,780 --> 00:03:22,270 in the other hand, and you go take one, take two, take three. 33 00:03:22,480 --> 00:03:26,440 Probably by the time you finish reading all of them, we've forgotten what your question was in the first place. 34 00:03:26,500 --> 00:03:32,739 Okay, so what are we going to try to do today is give you a framework of two simple acronyms 35 00:03:32,740 --> 00:03:37,690 to try to remember how to do critical appraisal and first critical appraisal, 36 00:03:38,050 --> 00:03:47,560 particularly of randomised controlled trials. And I think during the small group exercises you all looked at exercise, 37 00:03:47,560 --> 00:03:56,920 one of your abstracts had to deal the dealt with this particular clinical question which is in people who take long haul flights, 38 00:03:56,920 --> 00:03:59,830 does wearing graduated compression stockings prevent DVT? 39 00:04:00,160 --> 00:04:05,560 So the first question I want to ask is how many of you have had a long haul flight in the last couple of years? 40 00:04:06,370 --> 00:04:14,950 Just don't know how many of you up for stockings, compression stockings. 41 00:04:17,110 --> 00:04:25,300 Okay. And those are you didn't let's see how many of you those of you that didn't, how many of you would think about wearing compression stockings? 42 00:04:28,070 --> 00:04:31,640 Okay. Let's see if we can change that towards the end of the session, or maybe not. 43 00:04:32,960 --> 00:04:36,650 So for those of you who don't know what compression is talking, so I have an example. 44 00:04:37,760 --> 00:04:44,690 So these are the typical compression stockings worn by one of the teachers in this week's course. 45 00:04:44,870 --> 00:04:49,580 And I need a volunteer to wear these stockings. 46 00:04:52,210 --> 00:04:58,240 Washington. They've been very clean. Yeah. 47 00:04:58,260 --> 00:05:03,150 Three or four can do it. And give the talk at the same time someone could. 48 00:05:03,270 --> 00:05:08,430 Actually, you're in perfect position because it's very similar to what type of seats you were getting on an aeroplane as well. 49 00:05:11,770 --> 00:05:14,790 Yeah. Two on the flight. Could you put both on? Thanks. 50 00:05:14,820 --> 00:05:28,140 You. Okay. Now, in your workbooks, you can find in page 73 of your workbooks. 51 00:05:35,320 --> 00:05:38,740 What search function to try to answer this particular question. 52 00:05:39,490 --> 00:05:43,810 Okay. And they came up. Well, we came up with a particular study. 53 00:05:47,020 --> 00:05:54,460 By Ska in 2001, and the full study of the full paper can be found page 95. 54 00:05:54,780 --> 00:06:04,950 So if you go to page 95, what books? Okay. 55 00:06:05,730 --> 00:06:10,560 You'll be able to see the full study as reported in The Lancet in 2001. 56 00:06:11,520 --> 00:06:19,950 For the rest of the presentation, I'll be asking you to come up with the answers for the different parts of the quest of of the critical appraisal. 57 00:06:20,220 --> 00:06:25,500 Should be able you should be able to find in the paper right there. 58 00:06:25,800 --> 00:06:36,210 Okay. So the first thing to do is to think about whether this particular study that we found is relevant and can answer the question that we have. 59 00:06:36,870 --> 00:06:46,020 And for that, we've already generated a structured question using a picture from a clinical setting. 60 00:06:47,490 --> 00:06:56,819 And what we want to do is do exactly the same to generate the picture or the question that was trying to answer whoever wrote this particular paper. 61 00:06:56,820 --> 00:07:02,520 So we weren't going to set up to find the high school for this particular trial. 62 00:07:02,790 --> 00:07:06,600 So I want you to have a look. I'll give you 20, 30 seconds. 63 00:07:06,810 --> 00:07:11,520 Search around in the and the article to identify the participants, 64 00:07:11,820 --> 00:07:17,070 the intervention group, comparison group and the outcome that they were interested in. 65 00:07:53,120 --> 00:07:56,360 It's not a solo exercise. We obviously can confer with your neighbours. 66 00:07:57,260 --> 00:08:02,020 You're happy to talk, but it is a critical appraisal exercise. 67 00:08:02,030 --> 00:08:10,939 So let's let's crack on. The other thing that I want you to notice here, I've set up the PI connects to a series of geometrical shapes, 68 00:08:10,940 --> 00:08:19,160 and this is what is called the Gape framework developed by Rod Jackson. 69 00:08:19,580 --> 00:08:28,790 And the way he came up with this series of figures is he was looking at where we are, the Xbox generation. 70 00:08:29,060 --> 00:08:36,560 And this is pretty much what he's that's a lot of people that use play with Xbox and these are actually the figures that come in, 71 00:08:36,560 --> 00:08:37,700 the experts, a triangle, 72 00:08:38,120 --> 00:08:48,980 a circle, a square, and then the light from the triangle will represent precisely the population with unidentified target that you want to look at. 73 00:08:49,190 --> 00:08:54,260 And then how it narrows down to who you actually included in your trial. 74 00:08:54,680 --> 00:08:59,990 Then you have a circle which sort of creates the population that you encounter. 75 00:09:00,500 --> 00:09:08,660 So we put into the trial into two groups, the intervention group, whoever you want to, to apply whatever therapy it is that you want to apply. 76 00:09:08,840 --> 00:09:13,190 And then a control group or comparator group and the circle with dividing in the middle 77 00:09:13,370 --> 00:09:19,049 sort of highlights the fact that actually looking at pretty much the same individuals, 78 00:09:19,050 --> 00:09:25,190 so the same type of comparable groups with the only difference that these two groups have being the intervention as such. 79 00:09:25,340 --> 00:09:29,720 So anything that we find different between these two groups will be down to the intervention. 80 00:09:30,260 --> 00:09:36,169 And finally, an outcome which is a square just typical at two by two table with what we have, 81 00:09:36,170 --> 00:09:40,129 whether they have the intervention or whether they were intervention of the 82 00:09:40,130 --> 00:09:43,580 control group and whether they have the outcome or they didn't have the outcome. 83 00:09:43,670 --> 00:09:51,469 So that's the framework. And it's very useful because as you go around, for example, through a paper and you find things about the population, 84 00:09:51,470 --> 00:09:54,870 you can just put a little triangle next to to the, to the paper. 85 00:09:54,910 --> 00:09:57,650 And they said, okay, this is something about the population, something about the population. 86 00:09:57,890 --> 00:10:00,950 You find something about the intervention as such describes that you can just put 87 00:10:00,950 --> 00:10:06,319 a little a little circle and identify the the intervention of the control groups, 88 00:10:06,320 --> 00:10:09,710 that way of descriptions of intervention and the same thing with the outcome. 89 00:10:10,190 --> 00:10:12,980 Okay, so look at this particular paper. 90 00:10:13,070 --> 00:10:25,820 What was the population that were interesting in in looking at estimates of passengers compared with 41 years of age over 50 years, 91 00:10:26,240 --> 00:10:30,260 the most history with no past history women. 92 00:10:32,330 --> 00:10:39,680 Okay. Okay, so that's fairly specific. So passengers of long haul flights, they specify the this 8 hours. 93 00:10:39,680 --> 00:10:47,540 Okay. Passengers of long haul flights longer than 8 hours over 50 returning to the UK in the next six months. 94 00:10:47,720 --> 00:10:54,530 Six weeks. Okay. So it's fairly specific. Does that match up with the P that we have in our question, critical question. 95 00:10:57,750 --> 00:11:03,390 Reminder people take long haul flights. Well, maybe it's a bit too specific because they're looking at over fifties. 96 00:11:04,290 --> 00:11:13,080 Right. Maybe just the right the right time. So they're looking at a very fairly tight group of people by way of intervention. 97 00:11:13,110 --> 00:11:20,370 What was the intervention that they're looking at? Didn't specify the type of stockings. 98 00:11:22,530 --> 00:11:25,560 So you would be able to go and buy these stockings. Okay. 99 00:11:25,760 --> 00:11:31,980 That's quite important as well in terms of whether we could actually generalise the findings or replicate the findings. 100 00:11:32,790 --> 00:11:36,480 Finally, what was the comparator that they used did not work. 101 00:11:38,550 --> 00:11:45,840 Okay. So nothing. All right. Okay. Again, I think it matches roughly a clinical setting. 102 00:11:46,110 --> 00:11:52,620 And finally, what outcome do they look to? Symptomless, DVT. 103 00:11:52,740 --> 00:11:57,030 How is that assessed? Okay. 104 00:11:57,120 --> 00:12:02,069 We'll come back to that in a second. So all of these things that we've identified in a way, 105 00:12:02,070 --> 00:12:08,580 the picture of the study that we've retrieved and what we need to decide is whether the 106 00:12:08,580 --> 00:12:14,040 picture of this particular study matches the picture that we had in our structure. 107 00:12:14,040 --> 00:12:17,880 Question. If it doesn't, we can take it away. We don't need to do anything else. 108 00:12:18,480 --> 00:12:22,170 Okay. That said, if it does, then we can go to the next step. 109 00:12:22,980 --> 00:12:29,430 We decided it can be relevant. So now we want to assess whether it is valid with internal validity or not. 110 00:12:29,820 --> 00:12:35,460 Okay. So we have a call for relevance and we have another acronym for Internal Validity. 111 00:12:35,700 --> 00:12:39,330 And this next acronym is Rambo. Okay. 112 00:12:42,510 --> 00:12:51,450 And it stands for, in the case of therapy studies, recruitment, allocation, concealment, 113 00:12:52,740 --> 00:12:58,380 maintenance measurements, and where these measurements were blinded and objective. 114 00:12:58,680 --> 00:13:02,730 And we'll go through each one of these bits in more detail in a second. 115 00:13:02,820 --> 00:13:08,910 Okay. These are the things we need to identify in order to determine whether the study study 116 00:13:09,180 --> 00:13:15,260 was done to a high quality for then the results to be of any use to us whatsoever. 117 00:13:15,270 --> 00:13:24,690 If we decide that any of these things are not done adequately, then we might or this particular study might be introducing some kind of bias, 118 00:13:25,350 --> 00:13:30,330 which would mean that the results they find, no matter how big the trial was, 119 00:13:30,750 --> 00:13:35,130 the results that they found might not be answering the relevant question. 120 00:13:35,670 --> 00:13:41,310 And that's why we want to do this. Before we do, we look at any anything related to the actual results of the study. 121 00:13:41,610 --> 00:13:45,960 And normally you would find all of these things in the methods side of of of the of the paper. 122 00:13:46,260 --> 00:13:49,319 So you look at the methods side of the paper to find things about recruitment, 123 00:13:49,320 --> 00:13:56,430 whether they did randomisation, how is the maintenance done and the type of measurements that were involved? 124 00:13:58,590 --> 00:14:03,959 So Tamarod on Rambo is the thing that we're going to be focusing on for doing critical appraisal or validity, 125 00:14:03,960 --> 00:14:08,280 internal validity of a randomised controlled trial. And just to break it into small bits. 126 00:14:08,670 --> 00:14:09,930 First we look at recruitment, 127 00:14:11,070 --> 00:14:19,380 try to identify in a way we're matching the Piku and the Rambo doing the internal validity and the relevance of the study. 128 00:14:20,610 --> 00:14:26,310 So in parallel. So the first step is to find out who did the studies that the subjects represent. 129 00:14:28,020 --> 00:14:32,639 Then we'll find out about a location, whether the assignment of treatments with randomise or not. 130 00:14:32,640 --> 00:14:36,750 We'll explain why this is important, where the groups similar to the trials start. 131 00:14:37,530 --> 00:14:43,890 Then we look at maintenance, which is where the groups are treated equally, where outcomes ascertain and analyse from those patients. 132 00:14:44,670 --> 00:14:45,420 And finally, 133 00:14:45,420 --> 00:14:52,920 the measurements and we will discuss why blinding is an issue and when blinding is an issue and what type of blinding is important or not. 134 00:14:53,220 --> 00:15:00,780 And finally, whether the measurements were objective or standardised and the objectivity and the blinding of the of the outcomes are tied in. 135 00:15:01,140 --> 00:15:06,150 So you might be more interested in blinding, particularly when the outcome is not objective or fairly subjective. 136 00:15:06,240 --> 00:15:09,660 And finally, we look a little bit about the the results and study statistics. 137 00:15:10,650 --> 00:15:18,390 So let's focus first on the steps one and two of the are the recruitment and allocation. 138 00:15:18,400 --> 00:15:25,290 I want you to have a look at, again, the article and try to identify who they managed to recruit and. 139 00:15:27,730 --> 00:15:37,000 What how do they actually work through their allocation. So how do they randomise and whether groups around the trial trial stuff. 140 00:15:37,990 --> 00:15:44,990 And in many cases you might find these in figures and tables rather than lengthy descriptions. 141 00:15:44,990 --> 00:15:49,990 So have a look at try to make it fairly. You'll find that in practice. 142 00:15:49,990 --> 00:15:55,420 With practice, you might get this really, really fairly quickly. I'll give you again another 30 seconds. 143 00:16:40,820 --> 00:16:50,080 Okay. Let's move on. So in terms of who they collect, who they identify, did anyone find? 144 00:16:53,050 --> 00:16:57,040 Well, we already talked about what type of population they were interested in finding. 145 00:16:57,250 --> 00:17:05,260 So these were people in long haul flights over 50 with no previous history of deep vein thrombosis. 146 00:17:05,680 --> 00:17:09,310 Did they get those people to anyone? 147 00:17:09,890 --> 00:17:13,030 I mean, it's not related to this, but they actually collected. 148 00:17:14,170 --> 00:17:21,340 Because sometimes a study would say this is the type of population we want to identify and the people they actually get in is completely different. 149 00:17:22,270 --> 00:17:26,000 Okay, so the pi coin, the original question might not be. 150 00:17:26,020 --> 00:17:32,080 May not match the population or the people that weren't actually in the trial. 151 00:17:32,380 --> 00:17:38,170 What about here? Do they actually match? 50%. 152 00:17:38,680 --> 00:17:42,760 50%. That's okay. 153 00:17:42,970 --> 00:17:49,730 The only one identified sort of how they recruited. Newspapers took. 154 00:17:55,250 --> 00:17:59,600 Okay. And that was to determine whether they were okay. 155 00:17:59,870 --> 00:18:09,060 So in a sense, it seems that, yes, that part was tight and fight was an issue to decide whether there were 50 probably. 156 00:18:09,860 --> 00:18:13,430 What about long term, long haul flights? That was a third part of the inclusion criteria. 157 00:18:17,360 --> 00:18:22,610 Okay. And why they included people on the aircraft. 158 00:18:22,910 --> 00:18:32,020 I mean, I've just quickly gone through the. Okay. And I was trying to see why I think was the question, was prevention simple? 159 00:18:32,600 --> 00:18:40,729 I mean, I'm I felt like they wanted to see a higher frequency indication that this expired high frequency goes above 50. 160 00:18:40,730 --> 00:18:44,030 But knowing the opposite, this is why you chose specifically. 161 00:18:44,150 --> 00:18:46,219 Okay. Okay. 162 00:18:46,220 --> 00:18:53,540 So that they might that might be something that if you were to apply these findings to someone else, if they were under 50, you might disable it. 163 00:18:54,230 --> 00:18:58,220 I'm not entirely sure. Yeah. Okay. Generalisability of the question. 164 00:18:59,900 --> 00:19:03,150 Okay. Yeah. That that could be maybe one of the shortcomings. 165 00:19:03,170 --> 00:19:07,930 Maybe you wanted to know further, but I think in a way, you've answered the question yourself. 166 00:19:08,600 --> 00:19:11,690 But I think sometimes I should, because at the hospital, when they said that, 167 00:19:12,140 --> 00:19:17,180 they think that that was not ideal authority to exclude individuals at highest risk. 168 00:19:17,990 --> 00:19:25,580 So, again, I'm not really sure what are trying to say, but I expect that they did at one point a greater frequency, 169 00:19:25,970 --> 00:19:29,210 but yet at the last part, they excluded girls who are at high risk. 170 00:19:29,480 --> 00:19:35,570 And I think in this case, the reason for excluding those at higher risk is to in a way so that previous episodes. 171 00:19:36,170 --> 00:19:41,860 Yeah. And questions in a previous. Yeah. Yes. 172 00:19:42,230 --> 00:19:49,130 And also to make it more generalisable to the overall population, I guess, and to decide whether the long haul flight was positive or not. 173 00:19:52,740 --> 00:19:56,490 That's right. Okay. Let's see how it is played. 174 00:19:56,490 --> 00:20:00,900 The sample size is high sample size. I think they don't mention that. 175 00:20:01,720 --> 00:20:05,490 Oh, sorry. They do mention that. We've got we'll go into that much later on. 176 00:20:07,440 --> 00:20:12,419 So in terms of whether they collect the right sort of people, 177 00:20:12,420 --> 00:20:18,540 I think they did at least identify a group that they decided or they said they were going to identify. 178 00:20:19,620 --> 00:20:25,560 The next step is whether they actually did the right type of allocation. 179 00:20:25,890 --> 00:20:34,530 That is, whether they randomise these individuals to the two groups in such a way that no systematic bias could be found. 180 00:20:34,530 --> 00:20:42,120 That is, I will always watch all the men in one group and all the women in the other group that could potentially have a problem. 181 00:20:42,450 --> 00:20:48,750 So to do they identified what did they say, how they chose the two groups. 182 00:20:52,170 --> 00:21:00,540 Okay. So they were randomised the randomised volunteers by sealed envelope to one of two groups. 183 00:21:00,810 --> 00:21:04,830 Okay. You're happy with that. I'm not sure I'll be randomised. 184 00:21:05,610 --> 00:21:14,760 They just had an envelope. Okay. That was not unless this is related to our envelopes. 185 00:21:14,970 --> 00:21:18,270 Okay. So we have our envelopes at hand. 186 00:21:18,510 --> 00:21:35,810 Well, I need to now open them. Amanda and I. 187 00:21:40,580 --> 00:21:47,570 So you should have one of two. You've been randomly allocated to fruit pastilles or fruit gums. 188 00:21:47,720 --> 00:21:51,860 Right. Okay. And there were envelopes. 189 00:21:54,200 --> 00:21:57,560 Did anyone switch their envelope around? 190 00:21:59,810 --> 00:22:04,280 Okay. Did anyone open the envelopes before I asked? Okay. 191 00:22:04,280 --> 00:22:13,730 A couple. So we might we might have some problems in terms of of how they were how randomisation was was. 192 00:22:17,150 --> 00:22:21,470 Of course I don't want there. We have contamination swabbing. 193 00:22:25,160 --> 00:22:29,810 Yeah. Okay. And these are all things that could potentially happen in a randomised controlled trial. 194 00:22:29,960 --> 00:22:41,240 Okay. So thinking about what we've just done, we've done our own media randomisation. 195 00:22:41,260 --> 00:22:48,730 I want to ask two, but we have two particular outcomes and is related to long haul flights who have been to Australia. 196 00:22:50,020 --> 00:22:54,010 Those that have been to Australia can be raise your hands. Okay. 197 00:22:54,460 --> 00:22:59,800 How many sorry? How many of those that have been to Australia have the gums, fighting gums. 198 00:22:59,800 --> 00:23:04,390 One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12. 199 00:23:08,410 --> 00:23:16,240 And how many of those have the still? Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. 200 00:23:18,940 --> 00:23:26,140 Okay. Okay. So in this case, I would maybe say that randomisation, roughly work. 201 00:23:26,170 --> 00:23:30,760 We have roughly the same numbers in each one of the groups. 202 00:23:31,130 --> 00:23:38,440 Okay. We have 12 and ten that if we want to do a proper statistical test, we probably will find that it's not statistically significant. 203 00:23:39,580 --> 00:23:46,900 What about who how many of those who had the guns made us noble in the last 24 hours? 204 00:23:50,180 --> 00:23:57,490 That comes. One, two, three. How about a positive? 205 00:23:59,760 --> 00:24:03,870 One, two, three, four, five, six. Twice the number. 206 00:24:05,130 --> 00:24:14,700 Okay, so here we have an outcome that's actually less likely to happen, and we have twice as many. 207 00:24:14,900 --> 00:24:16,979 Probably if we were to test this thing, 208 00:24:16,980 --> 00:24:25,290 maybe we actually show that there's a statistically significant difference between the two groups for that particular outcome. 209 00:24:25,440 --> 00:24:28,770 And this was a completely random you have to agree. 210 00:24:30,240 --> 00:24:35,460 And this is, again, this sort of illustrate the type of things that you might find in a trial, 211 00:24:35,820 --> 00:24:39,510 even though you have randomisation, even even if you do randomisation properly, 212 00:24:39,720 --> 00:24:47,799 just by chance, you might find that some characteristics in one group happen to be higher than another group of high school status. 213 00:24:47,800 --> 00:24:51,480 So why should we be a double cross? Should be for arbitrary five. 214 00:24:54,030 --> 00:25:00,990 Intention to treat as well. That's another thing that you need to. So there are some crossover here. 215 00:25:05,090 --> 00:25:14,140 Okay. All right. So how do we ensure allocation, concealment? 216 00:25:14,170 --> 00:25:18,430 There are several different methods, so you can try to deal with this. 217 00:25:19,360 --> 00:25:27,099 And generally the one that's decided to be the best is to use some kind of central computer randomisation, 218 00:25:27,100 --> 00:25:36,280 where when there's someone actually doing the randomisation for you that is outside that person, that's including the participants in the trial. 219 00:25:36,910 --> 00:25:45,610 And generally, we for example, if you're entering someone to the trial, you phone a central person doing the randomisation. 220 00:25:45,610 --> 00:25:49,899 They tell you, oh, it's labelled blah, blah, blah, two, three, four or five, 221 00:25:49,900 --> 00:25:54,340 or it belongs to the placebo group, and therefore it has to receive this type of treatment. 222 00:25:54,340 --> 00:26:02,890 And because there's that barrier between the person enrolling a participant and the person doing the randomisation, 223 00:26:03,040 --> 00:26:10,240 then in a way you make sure that there's no problems, that the concealment is actually done adequately. 224 00:26:10,810 --> 00:26:21,580 Now the second step would be used, and another approach would be to use, for example, envelopes, and this is seen as could be affected by tampering. 225 00:26:21,580 --> 00:26:29,590 And here we have a little example with if someone is very interested in finding out what group they're going to be allocated to, 226 00:26:29,920 --> 00:26:36,070 you might even look through the envelope, try to how many of you, for example, try to feel what the. 227 00:26:38,200 --> 00:26:44,710 Okay. And maybe if you had this take away was fruit pastilles versus something completely different, you would have swap don't know. 228 00:26:45,340 --> 00:26:55,140 So envelopes can be tampered with. And for that particular reason, they're seen as potentially suspect, but it's still using randomisation. 229 00:26:55,150 --> 00:27:04,020 And finally, we have some studies that are actually not randomised when the allocation is is done by some characteristic of the participants. 230 00:27:04,030 --> 00:27:09,490 I could be, for example, the date of birth when they come in at alternative alternate days. 231 00:27:09,880 --> 00:27:18,010 And the problem with that is that you've already allocated the individual just just because of that particular characteristic. 232 00:27:18,010 --> 00:27:23,890 And if that characteristic has an association with something else that might affect your findings in your trial, 233 00:27:24,130 --> 00:27:28,570 in a way, what you're doing is you're creating two groups that are different. 234 00:27:29,380 --> 00:27:32,470 They're not exactly the same. They're different because of one particular characteristic. 235 00:27:32,950 --> 00:27:39,670 And in a randomised controlled trial, the objective is precisely to create two groups that are exactly the same except for the intervention. 236 00:27:43,830 --> 00:27:53,370 So the question is, in this particular trial with a group similar to the trials, does they give us any information about that, whether they say. 237 00:27:56,960 --> 00:28:04,430 So if you have a look at your table one. Are you happy with the information they provide you? 238 00:28:04,880 --> 00:28:09,350 Do you believe that the two groups are two groups created on roughly the same? 239 00:28:12,170 --> 00:28:17,450 Do you find any differences with gender? 240 00:28:17,960 --> 00:28:23,360 Okay. Number of women. So the gender, of course, is actually about all this stuff. 241 00:28:24,020 --> 00:28:28,430 Okay. So one thing that I should ask, how many of you always fly business class? 242 00:28:30,440 --> 00:28:33,620 Okay, so you can all stay and this is relevant to everyone. 243 00:28:34,100 --> 00:28:39,730 So that may be important. Why? Because the three of you know that there's space to move around. 244 00:28:40,910 --> 00:28:48,720 Okay. So to say, what happened to those two women that were excluded? 245 00:28:48,740 --> 00:28:52,850 Are you happy with that? Okay. That was part of the inclusion exclusion criteria. 246 00:28:56,240 --> 00:29:03,200 Were those two in the same group? I remember. I think that I'm not sure if they specified. 247 00:29:03,830 --> 00:29:11,690 So besides gender, was there any other thing that you identify in terms of the baseline characteristics that might be different? 248 00:29:15,350 --> 00:29:29,060 But despite the. The last two the last to feel positive and positive now is that is that a genetic markers that right. 249 00:29:29,370 --> 00:29:30,950 Yeah. Okay. Okay. 250 00:29:31,280 --> 00:29:43,010 And again, those were done to try to identify if there was some one of these genetic markers where associated with deep vein thrombosis. 251 00:29:44,060 --> 00:29:50,930 Um, the non stockings were slightly higher and one stockings were higher, slightly higher in the other. 252 00:29:51,350 --> 00:29:57,230 I think a direct test might not show any fact, but it's similar to what we have here. 253 00:29:57,770 --> 00:30:00,640 So why is this important? 254 00:30:00,650 --> 00:30:09,960 We don't want to do a direct comparison between these two things or work out the p value of differences in the event rate of each one of these things. 255 00:30:10,310 --> 00:30:16,280 Because that's not really what we're interested in, but we want to identify that potential differences between the two groups. 256 00:30:16,640 --> 00:30:21,560 Why? Because we one need we might need to take that into account when we're interpreting our results. 257 00:30:21,920 --> 00:30:29,140 So what are we doing? Finding out, doing our analysis. We might need to, for example, identify that women, slightly more women in the stockings group. 258 00:30:31,070 --> 00:30:35,760 Does anyone know? Yeah, well, because. 259 00:30:35,880 --> 00:30:41,100 Don't you think that. Because you want to. For that. 260 00:30:44,030 --> 00:30:56,260 Four, two, one, two, one, one, six. And 45 out of 115 up the hole, I imagine, is a whole group. 261 00:30:57,160 --> 00:31:03,820 Yep. And much as I would say good points, if they had more varicose veins in my head, I wouldn't have an impact. 262 00:31:04,030 --> 00:31:08,530 So anyone know if women or men are more prone to having deep vein thrombosis? 263 00:31:09,160 --> 00:31:12,190 So I'm not clinicians. Okay. 264 00:31:12,670 --> 00:31:17,780 So if if women are more prone to having having the pain from both this and the ones in the stockings, 265 00:31:19,090 --> 00:31:25,480 what we we expect in our findings to would be favouring stockings. 266 00:31:25,720 --> 00:31:29,500 Going against stockings. Yes. Okay. Okay. 267 00:31:29,680 --> 00:31:36,940 So, if anything, this imbalance that we find might be biasing against stockings. 268 00:31:37,120 --> 00:31:37,420 Right. 269 00:31:37,870 --> 00:31:43,809 And this this other type of things that you need to take into account, we need to be thinking about when you look at the baseline characteristics, 270 00:31:43,810 --> 00:31:48,910 not only if there's a potential difference, but also in which direction those differences might bias. 271 00:31:48,910 --> 00:31:53,920 Here, we felt. Okay. So. 272 00:31:57,710 --> 00:32:07,300 So I could give you participation in that one quarter to the emails and all this. 273 00:32:08,970 --> 00:32:15,560 Okay. So it may be that men were less likely to agree to participate. 274 00:32:15,620 --> 00:32:25,620 That's true. That's true. Do you think that's just because men don't want to wear compression stockings? 275 00:32:27,390 --> 00:32:32,010 But John, John, John was the only one that volunteered, so that was against it. 276 00:32:32,820 --> 00:32:38,220 But it may be that participation was less an issue in terms of getting men to do it. 277 00:32:38,580 --> 00:32:46,530 I think if we had a more efficient group would still be who would expect to do this to have more? 278 00:32:47,920 --> 00:32:54,930 So, of course, that's right. So this is the damage was evident in the study. 279 00:32:55,410 --> 00:33:02,850 It would if we if we find if our finding is the opposite, yet if our finding is the opposite, 280 00:33:02,850 --> 00:33:12,929 that the stockings have less than sorry, this particular light, this particular issue would bias against stockings. 281 00:33:12,930 --> 00:33:21,239 So if we find that stockings actually effective, then we might be more likely to believe it if it cuts out the characteristic. 282 00:33:21,240 --> 00:33:29,880 So some people might be more willing to cooperate, theoretically saying, yeah, okay, now I know what the study is doing. 283 00:33:30,630 --> 00:33:36,800 Yeah. Do I think they mentioned that, don't they, that they highlight the fact that because these are all participants. 284 00:33:37,250 --> 00:33:46,510 Yes. So we've looked at the first two parts of our Rambo recruitment allocation. 285 00:33:46,520 --> 00:33:49,280 Let's look at the third one maintenance. And for this, 286 00:33:49,280 --> 00:33:57,530 we want to focus on whether the groups were treated equally or not and whether the outcomes were 287 00:33:57,530 --> 00:34:04,190 ascertained in the same way for both groups and ascertained from most patients and most patients. 288 00:34:04,820 --> 00:34:06,830 Why is this important? Okay. 289 00:34:07,820 --> 00:34:17,180 Let me talk very briefly about what could happen if we have groups in a randomised controlled trial that are actually treated slightly differently, 290 00:34:18,800 --> 00:34:29,150 not because of information but because of something else. There was a randomised controlled trial of vitamin E in preterm infants that's aimed to 291 00:34:29,960 --> 00:34:33,800 check whether there was an effect of vitamin D preventing ritual landfills to replace it, 292 00:34:33,800 --> 00:34:38,000 which is basically a condition with newborn. 293 00:34:38,540 --> 00:34:44,150 Sorry, preterm infants basically go blind. That's that's the simple way to explain it. 294 00:34:44,690 --> 00:34:50,150 And they found that there was an effect so that, yeah, vitamin E did prevent this. 295 00:34:50,840 --> 00:34:58,219 However, looking more closely what was happening is that in order to give them vitamin D, 296 00:34:58,220 --> 00:35:05,900 they had to be removed from the 100% oxygen chamber, and they were given that vitamin D and then put back in. 297 00:35:06,410 --> 00:35:10,010 And it was actually that wasn't done to the control group. 298 00:35:11,180 --> 00:35:13,280 Okay. So it was that aspect. 299 00:35:13,700 --> 00:35:22,130 Rather than giving them or not giving them a vitamin B, vitamin D that was having the impact on the outcome that was preventing them going blind. 300 00:35:22,490 --> 00:35:31,460 Okay. So whenever we do a trial, we need to make sure that apart from the intervention, everything else is done in the same way. 301 00:35:31,550 --> 00:35:37,190 Otherwise it might be whichever other thing is not being done in the same way for for both groups, 302 00:35:37,460 --> 00:35:41,000 that might be the one responsible for the effect that we have. 303 00:35:41,180 --> 00:35:45,920 We actually getting rid of the, of the, of the main benefit of doing a randomised controlled trial. 304 00:35:46,250 --> 00:35:48,110 So in the case of for example, 305 00:35:48,110 --> 00:35:57,110 a drug trial is relatively straightforward because we have a drug trial and generally a placebo and everything else is done in the same way. 306 00:35:57,110 --> 00:36:04,040 So you give, you give them medication, you tell them to, you tell whoever it is to take them two or three times a day. 307 00:36:04,190 --> 00:36:07,489 You follow it up for however long, and then you find what the outcome is. 308 00:36:07,490 --> 00:36:11,870 So everything is exactly the same, and then you can be sure if there's a difference, 309 00:36:12,080 --> 00:36:16,490 then the active ingredient in the drug, in the medication is what's actually having the effect. 310 00:36:17,060 --> 00:36:21,170 Okay. In some of the interventions like for example, this one. 311 00:36:22,130 --> 00:36:27,709 Yeah, stockings it's a bit more different were even more difficult to identify that all the 312 00:36:27,710 --> 00:36:32,300 participants did exactly the same thing or had slightly the same type of intervention. 313 00:36:32,930 --> 00:36:38,480 But they do mention something and they talk about whether there was equal treatment in the two groups. 314 00:36:38,900 --> 00:36:45,320 Okay. In order to do that, they they, for example, present something in table three. 315 00:36:45,560 --> 00:36:54,320 And they they mentioned that looking at particularly had drugs that might affect the propensity of an individual to have deep vein thrombosis, 316 00:36:54,500 --> 00:37:00,860 that both groups were actually roughly in the same types of medications aspirin, hormone replacement therapy, etc. 317 00:37:01,400 --> 00:37:08,840 Whether it's anything else in terms of how these two groups were treated, do they mentioned that they were treated equally or differently? 318 00:37:09,200 --> 00:37:12,290 Can you have a look? I'm going to wait 10 seconds for you to. 319 00:37:18,460 --> 00:37:22,480 To identify anything else that was done differently or where they both treat in the same way. 320 00:37:32,720 --> 00:37:42,710 No. You have to turn to donations for the research volunteers that have to travel to time ships before their travel. 321 00:37:43,020 --> 00:37:46,580 Okay, I decided that it is just not practical to do that. 322 00:37:46,700 --> 00:37:55,140 Okay. The rest of the volunteers will have. And it doesn't actually say which group which you belong to. 323 00:37:55,500 --> 00:37:59,960 Okay. So it potentially could have made a slight difference. 324 00:37:59,970 --> 00:38:05,360 And they also don't don't say whether they happen to be the ones that had the vein thrombosis or not. 325 00:38:05,370 --> 00:38:13,380 But apart from that, I think that they do specify that they try to treat both groups in exactly the same way they gave the same type of advice. 326 00:38:14,400 --> 00:38:18,080 Okay. What about the follow up? 327 00:38:18,080 --> 00:38:23,389 And this is in terms, again, of maintenance, deciding whether they looked at it. 328 00:38:23,390 --> 00:38:29,660 They follow all the individuals they try to ascertain everyone in and they analysed everyone that got into into the trial. 329 00:38:30,140 --> 00:38:35,360 Now, what do you have on the right hand side? Is some sort of a flow diagram or flow diagram. 330 00:38:35,480 --> 00:38:39,680 So everyone familiar with them who's not familiar with load diagrams? 331 00:38:41,120 --> 00:38:50,449 Okay. Okay. So we have a total population that were considered and then how they, they, they go so how they excluded some, how many were excluded, 332 00:38:50,450 --> 00:38:56,509 how many were randomised to each one of the groups and then what happened to them and if they were excluded, 333 00:38:56,510 --> 00:39:02,900 the reasons why they were excluded and finally how many of them were analysed and we have hundred in each one of the groups. 334 00:39:04,940 --> 00:39:12,830 This is important because. But particularly the second part of it after randomisation. 335 00:39:14,270 --> 00:39:17,390 If we lose a lot of people if this. 336 00:39:20,550 --> 00:39:24,090 A great loss of follow up after randomisation. 337 00:39:24,750 --> 00:39:32,520 It might have a very important impact in how we interpret and analyse our findings. 338 00:39:34,290 --> 00:39:39,650 So for starters, it could be that this type of intervention cannot be applied to everyone. 339 00:39:39,870 --> 00:39:44,150 It could talk about it could be a proxy for the quality of the trial itself. 340 00:39:44,160 --> 00:39:53,700 If they lose 50% of their lives, 60% of the ones that were randomised, maybe the overall quality of what they actually find might be put into doubt. 341 00:39:54,090 --> 00:39:56,690 So this is this obviously a very important issue. 342 00:39:56,700 --> 00:40:04,320 And not only that, but it might be that the actual loss to follow up might be linked to something related to the intervention. 343 00:40:04,350 --> 00:40:05,909 So if we have differential attrition, 344 00:40:05,910 --> 00:40:14,580 which I'll go back for a second that we lose more in the intervention group than in control group that might start ringing some alarm bells. 345 00:40:14,580 --> 00:40:18,780 So there might be something wrong or interesting happening there. 346 00:40:21,450 --> 00:40:24,660 In this particular trial, there were 231 included. 347 00:40:24,690 --> 00:40:28,740 200 of them were analysed. So that was 87% of them. 348 00:40:28,950 --> 00:40:38,640 And they do tell us why they lost the other 3127 one were unable to attend so they just couldn't be bothered or 349 00:40:38,970 --> 00:40:44,580 they just didn't even come back to where it's clear from analysis because they were upgraded to business class. 350 00:40:44,730 --> 00:40:51,389 We just mentioned about that and to exclude because they were taking anticoagulants medication so that they 351 00:40:51,390 --> 00:40:58,080 were already likely to have probably likely to have from doses and therefore they were at higher risk. 352 00:40:59,460 --> 00:41:04,440 Okay. Any questions about that, too? Are we happy? Yes, absolutely. 353 00:41:07,910 --> 00:41:11,050 Okay. We'll talk that in a second. Any other witness? 354 00:41:11,660 --> 00:41:15,010 There's just a number of accounts of how to be secure. 355 00:41:15,050 --> 00:41:18,430 Number three shuts down. Okay. 356 00:41:18,690 --> 00:41:27,220 They do? Yeah, they do mention in in the methods that they were able to work out a sample size, 357 00:41:27,230 --> 00:41:31,870 a proper sample size calculation because they didn't have enough pilot studies. 358 00:41:31,880 --> 00:41:35,660 And, in fact, they they say that this can be treated as a pilot study. 359 00:41:36,110 --> 00:41:42,950 And what they had proposed is to keep doing it until they got 100 people recruiting into each other. 360 00:41:43,980 --> 00:41:48,680 I think that's that's why you get those very convenient numbers. 361 00:41:48,680 --> 00:41:58,610 But I think that's that's how they they set up to keep in terms of how many large groups they basically kept on recruiting. 362 00:41:58,640 --> 00:42:01,340 Oh, sorry, 4/100 for the proposed sample size. 363 00:42:04,370 --> 00:42:13,970 I can't remember if they mentioned specifically why one of the main objectives was to determine the prevalence of deep vein thrombosis. 364 00:42:14,870 --> 00:42:22,969 And I'm not sure if that's one of the the reasons why they said, well, with 100, we should be able to at least get get a rough. 365 00:42:22,970 --> 00:42:29,090 I think they do mention that if they if the vein thrombosis, the prevalence was fairly low about 2%, 366 00:42:29,360 --> 00:42:33,830 that would give them fairly tight confidence intervals with 100. And that's why they came up with that number. 367 00:42:34,700 --> 00:42:40,640 Remember that? Yes. That's how the study. 368 00:42:40,670 --> 00:42:45,980 Yep. Is that in or out, though? No. 369 00:42:46,430 --> 00:42:50,360 Conclusive. How? Yes. Well, there was a power calculation. 370 00:42:50,660 --> 00:42:56,730 How about the study? Okay. Yeah. 371 00:42:56,960 --> 00:43:01,700 The power of the study, in a way, tells you how likely you are to find a difference if one exists. 372 00:43:01,970 --> 00:43:10,490 So find an effect, even if it's actually present. If you if your trial is very small and there is an effect, you're probably not likely to find it. 373 00:43:10,590 --> 00:43:14,940 You could try this very, very large, even if the effect is small. Probably likely to find an effect. 374 00:43:15,440 --> 00:43:19,620 And we'll go more into that when we look at how to deal with uncertainty. 375 00:43:19,640 --> 00:43:23,120 So P values and confidence intervals. We'll talk about that in a second. 376 00:43:23,420 --> 00:43:34,340 But going back to how many can we lose if really is actually dependent on the type of condition you're looking at? 377 00:43:34,760 --> 00:43:42,800 So for some things, you want to have pretty much every one. For other things, you would be very, very happy if you have more than 20% followed up. 378 00:43:43,070 --> 00:43:49,460 So it's actually just tying yourself to one number is actually not helpful. 379 00:43:49,730 --> 00:43:54,050 But generally and as a rule of thumb, you can talk of the 5020 rule of thumb. 380 00:43:55,010 --> 00:44:02,780 And that basically means that if you lose about 5% of your individuals in terms of follow up does slightly to to produce very little bias. 381 00:44:03,200 --> 00:44:09,350 If you lose more than 20%, then actually have a strong implication in terms of the validity of the study. 382 00:44:09,710 --> 00:44:15,050 You're probably losing too many generally. Again, this has to be taken in context. 383 00:44:16,100 --> 00:44:24,790 Importantly, this depends, as I mentioned, in the outcome event rate and and also on comparative loss rates in the two groups. 384 00:44:24,800 --> 00:44:30,860 So if we have that the loss of follow up rate exceeds the outcome event. 385 00:44:31,240 --> 00:44:41,300 It's that we have a lot more that were lost to follow up than the number of people that benefited or or that did have or some believe vein thrombosis. 386 00:44:41,500 --> 00:44:47,600 However important because all of those that we lost may have had be vein thrombosis and we don't know about them. 387 00:44:48,140 --> 00:44:54,500 And probably more importantly, if the the attrition, the loss of follow up is differential, 388 00:44:54,500 --> 00:44:59,830 we have more in one group than another that might have, again, implications as to whether the treatment itself, 389 00:44:59,960 --> 00:45:09,770 the effect that we find is is is is real or it might be just being produced by the fact that we have differential follow ups. 390 00:45:09,980 --> 00:45:17,330 So, for example, let's say that we have a medication that is very that reduces people to feel very nauseous and people stop taking it. 391 00:45:17,510 --> 00:45:20,899 Therefore, you lose them from your analysis maybe, 392 00:45:20,900 --> 00:45:24,440 and you find that the medication is brilliant because you have you haven't actually taken 393 00:45:24,440 --> 00:45:28,250 into account of other people that actually couldn't take the medication in the first place. 394 00:45:28,730 --> 00:45:32,300 Okay. So that's might be an extreme example of differential follow up, right? 395 00:45:35,230 --> 00:45:43,780 And in this particular case, they do mention that there were losses, but these losses were equally distributed in the stock group. 396 00:45:43,990 --> 00:45:47,830 They lost six men and women, roughly 15 in the non-smoking group. 397 00:45:47,830 --> 00:45:53,320 So men and women with 16, do they have similar characteristics to those that were included? 398 00:45:54,790 --> 00:46:02,379 Unfortunately, they didn't actually provide information about them and say it could have been just a sentence in the article saying the people 399 00:46:02,380 --> 00:46:11,260 that were lost to follow up were roughly of the same age and and the medications taken were roughly the same as the other group. 400 00:46:11,290 --> 00:46:14,320 They don't provide that type of information, but it would have been important to know about them. 401 00:46:15,560 --> 00:46:20,800 And related to this is what I'm sure you've all heard of, is intention to treat principle, 402 00:46:21,190 --> 00:46:28,630 which maintains that once a patient is randomised to one of the groups they should be analysed in the group they were randomised to. 403 00:46:28,900 --> 00:46:39,850 So what Mike just did in terms of switching the wine gums and with pastilles would have still kept them into the gums initially. 404 00:46:40,270 --> 00:46:45,820 I think, okay, he should have he would have still be kept in the commonest group, okay. 405 00:46:46,000 --> 00:46:55,270 Because otherwise randomisation allows you randomisation means that if it's done properly, you get equivalent groups. 406 00:46:55,540 --> 00:47:03,280 But if you have some kind of crossover because you don't like gums or because you don't like stockings, let's say, 407 00:47:03,550 --> 00:47:10,810 then your findings might represent a completely different thing than the actually the actual effect of the intervention. 408 00:47:11,050 --> 00:47:21,580 Okay. One exception to the intention to treat principle is that if the patient is found to have on blind reassessment to have been ineligible, 409 00:47:22,660 --> 00:47:24,580 they should be excluded. And that's, for example, 410 00:47:24,580 --> 00:47:30,100 what was mentioned earlier on in terms of the people that were flying in business class were upgraded 411 00:47:30,100 --> 00:47:37,750 to business class because they were not they shouldn't be included as part of your population group. 412 00:47:37,990 --> 00:47:41,270 They were part of the group that was part one of the exclusion criteria. Okay. 413 00:47:41,350 --> 00:47:50,270 After after reassessment. So how do you assess the outcome for this trial or general belief? 414 00:47:51,910 --> 00:47:55,690 Okay, that that's a very good question. 415 00:47:55,690 --> 00:48:04,059 Intention to treat is very much seen as a gold gold standard way of doing the analysis. 416 00:48:04,060 --> 00:48:09,250 And it might be very difficult to implement depending on what type of outcome you have. 417 00:48:09,610 --> 00:48:17,259 If you have binary outcomes, where there's a very clear definition as to what with a positive outcome or what's a negative outcome, 418 00:48:17,260 --> 00:48:21,850 let's say the vein thrombosis, if you were able to. 419 00:48:22,900 --> 00:48:26,559 It's a simple scenario if you collected outcomes from everyone, 420 00:48:26,560 --> 00:48:33,160 but you just have things like crossovers and people just not doing what they were told, then that's fine. 421 00:48:33,160 --> 00:48:37,580 You just can keep them in the same group if you have not only people crossing over. 422 00:48:37,580 --> 00:48:45,070 We're also missing values. For example, you don't know if they had the brain thrombosis or if they didn't have thrombosis. 423 00:48:45,310 --> 00:48:51,250 You need to make some kind of decision as to what type of value you're going to give to that particular outcome, 424 00:48:51,490 --> 00:48:56,920 and then try to analyse with that assumption and without that assumption to see if you 425 00:48:57,190 --> 00:49:02,800 are actually increasing the or producing some kind of bias in your in your analysis. 426 00:49:03,070 --> 00:49:08,020 But if you looking at other types of outcomes like continuous data and it becomes slightly more complicated, 427 00:49:08,020 --> 00:49:19,510 you might need to use more sort of different statistical approaches to impute that missing information. 428 00:49:20,860 --> 00:49:28,840 Okay. Finally measurement, the last part of a run when we do measurements. 429 00:49:29,440 --> 00:49:37,840 What we're interested in is finding out whether the outcomes that we get are actually a true measure of the effect, if there is any. 430 00:49:38,290 --> 00:49:38,889 And for that, 431 00:49:38,890 --> 00:49:44,830 we're looking at things like whether the patients and clinicians were applying that or whether the measurements objective or not objective. 432 00:49:46,090 --> 00:49:53,560 So in this particular study, if you looked at your paper, it says that blood was taken from all participants before travel. 433 00:49:54,530 --> 00:49:58,750 Do they talk about the timer? Can anyone explain that to me? 434 00:50:00,610 --> 00:50:09,620 No. It's just one of the focus that comes out of what you just talked about, the process. 435 00:50:09,800 --> 00:50:16,690 Okay. And that that should be a fairly objective measure of the brain in the patients. 436 00:50:17,740 --> 00:50:22,750 Okay. And the other type of of outcome or measurement of the outcome that they use was ultrasonography. 437 00:50:22,880 --> 00:50:29,230 Okay. And they mentioned that all patients had ultrasonography once before travel, and then afterwards 30 of them had to. 438 00:50:30,520 --> 00:50:36,000 When you consider ultrasonography to be objective as well. Yeah. 439 00:50:36,250 --> 00:50:41,860 So whoever is doing the assessment, that's the comparable thing. 440 00:50:43,730 --> 00:50:48,590 Temptation. Okay. The skill of whoever is doing the assessment. 441 00:50:48,800 --> 00:50:57,050 Okay, so this so final, you see, we say we find that the outcome of all was measured using ultrasonography 24, 442 00:50:57,170 --> 00:51:09,340 48 hours after the return of the flight. Now relating ultrasonography to to the assessment of the outcome, 443 00:51:09,350 --> 00:51:20,149 here we have this one thing that we want to ask is whether blinding was done and when when for example, 444 00:51:20,150 --> 00:51:23,420 we read this was a randomised double blind study. 445 00:51:24,650 --> 00:51:34,010 Was that mean? So here we have an example where the we have the author being double blind versus single blinded. 446 00:51:34,250 --> 00:51:39,140 Okay. So double blinded might mean nothing at all. 447 00:51:39,650 --> 00:51:42,270 Okay. We need to identify who was actually blind. 448 00:51:42,380 --> 00:51:47,630 Were the participants blinded with the investigators planet with the outcomes of blind or the analyst blinded? 449 00:51:50,010 --> 00:51:59,389 That makes sense. Okay. Importantly, particularly for this type of study, we might need to identify if the person that was blind, 450 00:51:59,390 --> 00:52:04,460 what the outcome assesses, if the outcome was not objective. 451 00:52:05,270 --> 00:52:08,009 Why? Because in the worst case scenario, 452 00:52:08,010 --> 00:52:15,830 if the if the whoever is doing the assessment for that particular outcome has a belief that stockings work or they don't work, 453 00:52:16,580 --> 00:52:23,270 yeah, they might, for whatever reason, find more deep vein thrombosis in one group than another group. 454 00:52:24,470 --> 00:52:29,960 Okay. And that's why it's crucial to identify when reading an article who was blind and who wasn't lining. 455 00:52:34,030 --> 00:52:41,440 Do they mention who was blinded? I'll just want to get this from ultrasonography as we're blinded. 456 00:52:45,410 --> 00:52:49,850 They give this, most passengers remove their stockings on completion of the journey, 457 00:52:51,230 --> 00:52:55,340 and they don't say the nurse removes the stockings of those passengers who have continued to wear them. 458 00:52:56,960 --> 00:53:00,620 A further duplex combination was undertaken with a technician unaware of the group to 459 00:53:00,620 --> 00:53:04,220 which the volunteer has been randomised to generally want to take your stockings off. 460 00:53:09,090 --> 00:53:14,620 I'm sure. How did you find them? 461 00:53:15,490 --> 00:53:24,670 On pins and needles. Okay. So if someone were to analyse, to look at your legs right now, would they be able to tell if. 462 00:53:28,570 --> 00:53:36,900 If you were wearing stockings or not. How you reckon? 463 00:53:41,270 --> 00:53:46,799 You could describe. Yeah. 464 00:53:46,800 --> 00:53:50,370 That sounds, you know, similar there. 465 00:53:51,240 --> 00:53:54,430 Oh, yes. Okay. Thank you very much. 466 00:53:55,410 --> 00:53:58,440 Thank God. Thank you. Okay. 467 00:53:58,890 --> 00:54:08,340 So assessment was done in some cases when people were remove their stockings. 468 00:54:09,120 --> 00:54:13,310 Not that long ago, not many of them. 469 00:54:13,320 --> 00:54:19,780 Hopefully they don't specify how many of them. Okay. They don't mention any of this apart from that. 470 00:54:19,860 --> 00:54:27,630 Just a remark in passing. What do you think? It is important to continue awareness. 471 00:54:29,960 --> 00:54:33,620 Is there a benefit? Potentially maybe an issue. 472 00:54:34,190 --> 00:54:41,600 So it's not only the flight, but wearing them after the flight. We don't know the exact examination subject to the question. 473 00:54:42,110 --> 00:54:45,329 Which one do they. The ultrasound is subjective. 474 00:54:45,330 --> 00:54:48,370 The best is subjective. Okay. 475 00:54:50,460 --> 00:54:54,070 So if it's if it's objective, then we're not worried about the blinding. 476 00:54:54,590 --> 00:55:00,110 So the more objective an outcome is, the less we worry about the blinding, the less objective. 477 00:55:00,350 --> 00:55:09,260 So sample if it was a questionnaire that they had to fill in and it was a completely subjective assessment, 478 00:55:09,560 --> 00:55:13,700 in a way, we might be more worried if there was no blinding done. Okay. 479 00:55:16,840 --> 00:55:23,560 I'm going to go to talk finally about the results and when we have the results. 480 00:55:23,740 --> 00:55:28,060 We've done our analysis, we've done around, but we've decided that this is worthwhile looking into. 481 00:55:28,360 --> 00:55:32,490 Then there's the three basic when we look at the results of three basic explanations. 482 00:55:32,500 --> 00:55:38,800 One is that the findings that we have could be explained through placebo, through chance, or through a real effect placebo. 483 00:55:38,810 --> 00:55:44,170 So it's a very important explanation. 484 00:55:44,200 --> 00:55:51,400 Here we have a trial in patients with chronic severe itching of two types of medications we have. 485 00:55:51,760 --> 00:56:00,220 So perhaps adding and trimethoprim a pressing and we have a no treatment group and we have a score of an eating score. 486 00:56:01,030 --> 00:56:02,679 Okay. So looking at this, 487 00:56:02,680 --> 00:56:12,500 would you try one of those of these medications if you had a chronic severe itching or you would recommend to someone some say yes. 488 00:56:12,520 --> 00:56:19,330 I'm saying now, if I were to look a bit further and I like to present this, that was actually the same. 489 00:56:21,800 --> 00:56:32,740 If I am placebo group, then what do you would you do? Okay, so placebo is actually a very important explanatory intervention. 490 00:56:33,100 --> 00:56:38,990 Okay. It shouldn't be taken lightly. Chance. 491 00:56:39,440 --> 00:56:43,700 What about chance? And it's related to what John was mentioning in terms of sample sites, etc., etc. 492 00:56:44,060 --> 00:56:48,080 What about if it's just chance that we find whatever we found with the effect that we found? 493 00:56:48,110 --> 00:56:54,620 Well, there's two ways of trying to address that. That particular difference was done by chance, was happened to be there by chance. 494 00:56:54,950 --> 00:56:59,930 And the two ways that we deal with it is to use hypothesis testing basically p values, 495 00:57:00,350 --> 00:57:04,790 an estimation which is confidence intervals and many times they're given in conjunction. 496 00:57:04,790 --> 00:57:14,270 So you give both a p value and a confidence interval. A pivot is just a way of estimating how likely it is that the null hypothesis is true. 497 00:57:14,510 --> 00:57:22,160 So if the p value is very small and we would say the null hypothesis unlikely to be true generally a null hypothesis being there is no effect. 498 00:57:22,610 --> 00:57:27,770 So you have a p value that's very, very small. We say, okay, there's some evidence that there is an effect. 499 00:57:28,190 --> 00:57:33,860 The intervention in this case, stockings appear to work. On the second hand, we can have confidence intervals. 500 00:57:34,520 --> 00:57:44,570 When confidence intervals, well, they do very, very, very simple terms in estimates of range of values where the true effect probably will lie. 501 00:57:44,930 --> 00:57:51,020 Okay. So it gives you a number of a range of possible numbers where the effect is likely to be. 502 00:57:51,290 --> 00:57:58,250 And in the case of that, what we're looking at is a reduction in deep vein thrombosis. 503 00:57:58,460 --> 00:58:03,230 So how how are these two things integrated and presented, sorry, in this trial? 504 00:58:03,680 --> 00:58:09,469 So in the case of looking at hypothesis testing, they looked at incidence of big vein thrombosis. 505 00:58:09,470 --> 00:58:11,230 In the two groups, we have the stalking groups. 506 00:58:11,230 --> 00:58:18,350 So they have none of them have deep vein thrombosis, non symptomatic bleeding from doses in the no stocking group we have 12%. 507 00:58:18,950 --> 00:58:23,330 So that tells us there's a risk difference difference between the known stockings and the stockings. 508 00:58:24,080 --> 00:58:28,790 So the stock. Yeah. They're not talking about stockings of 12% that has associated a p value. 509 00:58:28,790 --> 00:58:38,060 That P value basically means if there was no effect, the chances of us seeing this difference is one in a thousand. 510 00:58:39,020 --> 00:58:42,470 Okay. If there's no effect, the chance of seeing this is one in a thousand. 511 00:58:42,770 --> 00:58:46,190 Therefore, it's very likely there is an effect. That's what that means. 512 00:58:47,660 --> 00:58:54,500 What about confidence intervals? Again, we have the values in the stock in group zero, non-smoking group 12%. 513 00:58:54,650 --> 00:58:56,360 The risk difference is again, 12%. 514 00:58:56,390 --> 00:59:05,330 We can calculate a confidence interval, interval or a range of values where the true difference should lie, and it goes from about 6% to 20%. 515 00:59:05,750 --> 00:59:12,440 That should be the difference that compression stockings probably would give you would give you an. 516 00:59:15,970 --> 00:59:22,960 What does that mean? Well, because we're actually interested in comparing this to what would happen if there was no effect. 517 00:59:23,590 --> 00:59:31,550 If there was no effect, then we would expect that the range of values that are possible to contain zero. 518 00:59:32,530 --> 00:59:39,250 Okay, zero would mean that it's equally likely that this could be explained by chance. 519 00:59:39,910 --> 00:59:45,520 And therefore, if series containing the confidence interval will say this is probably not statistically significant, 520 00:59:45,520 --> 00:59:52,149 just that it's just as explainable to say that whatever you found in this particular test, 521 00:59:52,150 --> 00:59:55,690 in this particular study could be due to just random variation. 522 00:59:57,220 --> 01:00:00,850 So we decided there is potentially a real effect. 523 01:00:01,960 --> 01:00:10,180 Okay. Given the two things that I just show you, the p value of one in a thousand and a confidence interval that does not obtain, 524 01:00:10,990 --> 01:00:13,090 does not contain C or there appears to be a real effect. 525 01:00:13,510 --> 01:00:18,190 So the next question I want to ask is now, would you consider wearing stockings on a long haul flight? 526 01:00:18,790 --> 01:00:23,240 How many of you would? No. 527 01:00:23,270 --> 01:00:29,240 No, many. You're still not completely convinced. If I were to tell you that there was a systematic review. 528 01:00:29,990 --> 01:00:35,510 Okay, now there's a systematic review. I looked at a lot of it from the ten randomised controlled trials. 529 01:00:36,320 --> 01:00:42,650 They did a critical appraisal of them. Nine of them looked at stockings in both legs versus not wearing then. 530 01:00:43,340 --> 01:00:48,010 And they actually there's a lot of extra information of these trials. 531 01:00:48,020 --> 01:00:53,719 Some of them were in low and medium risk, all of the others were in high risk participants getting away with this particular problem 532 01:00:53,720 --> 01:00:58,700 of these are for this particular other particular trial they were all over 50 with no, 533 01:00:59,810 --> 01:01:02,210 they were not at high risk for they were medium or low risk. 534 01:01:02,570 --> 01:01:12,170 So some information on high risk participants and the results were that 50 out of 2637 participants had symptomless DVT, 535 01:01:12,410 --> 01:01:16,250 three of them with stockings, and 47 with not with stockings. 536 01:01:17,720 --> 01:01:21,740 There were no that no pulmonary emboli or symptomatic DVT reported. 537 01:01:22,520 --> 01:01:29,390 Wearing stockings did have a significant impact on reducing oedema and no significant adverse events were reported. 538 01:01:30,040 --> 01:01:34,040 I mean, if you were to look at the forest plot, this is the type of information that you would get. 539 01:01:34,250 --> 01:01:38,000 We'll talk more about for plus later on. This is not really part of the main focus. 540 01:01:38,000 --> 01:01:41,090 They ask again, how many of you will consider wearing stockings? 541 01:01:42,920 --> 01:01:47,719 Half human. Okay. Thank you very much. 542 01:01:47,720 --> 01:01:48,980 Now go back to the small.