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Synthesizing existing evidence to design future trials: survey of methodologists from European institutions.

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-06-24, 08:34 authored by A Nikolakopoulou, S Trelle, AJ Sutton, M Egger, G Salanti
BACKGROUND: 'Conditional trial design' is a framework for efficiently planning new clinical trials based on a network of relevant existing trials. The framework considers whether new trials are required and how the existing evidence can be used to answer the research question and plan future research. The potential of this approach has not been fully realized. METHODS: We conducted an online survey among trial statisticians, methodologists, and users of evidence synthesis research using referral sampling to capture opinions about the conditional trial design framework and current practices among clinical researchers. The questions included in the survey were related to the decision of whether a meta-analysis answers the research question, the optimal way to synthesize available evidence, which relates to the acceptability of network meta-analysis, and the use of evidence synthesis in the planning of new studies. RESULTS: In total, 76 researchers completed the survey. Two out of three survey participants (65%) were willing to possibly or definitely consider using evidence synthesis to design a future clinical trial and around half of the participants would give priority to such a trial design. The median rating of the frequency of using such a trial design was 0.41 on a scale from 0 (never) to 1 (always). Major barriers to adopting conditional trial design include the current regulatory paradigm and the policies of funding agencies and sponsors. CONCLUSIONS: Participants reported moderate interest in using evidence synthesis methods in the design of future trials. They indicated that a major paradigm shift is required before the use of network meta-analysis is regularly employed in the design of trials.

Funding

AN is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. 179158). ME was supported by a special project funding (Grant No. 174281) from the Swiss National Science Foundation. GS received funding from a Horizon 2020 Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship (Grant no. 703254).

History

Citation

Trials, 2019, 20:334

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES/School of Medicine/Department of Health Sciences

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Trials

Publisher

BMC (part of Springer Nature)

eissn

1745-6215

Acceptance date

2019-05-13

Copyright date

2019

Available date

2019-06-24

Publisher version

https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3449-6

Notes

Additional files available online Additional file 1: List of invitations. (DOCX 22 kb) Additional file 2: Questionnaire. (DOCX 82 kb) Additional file 3: Full results. (DOCX 45 kb)

Language

en

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