Bmc Med
-
Randomized Controlled Trial
Optimising trial designs to identify appropriate antibiotic treatment durations.
For many infectious conditions, the optimal antibiotic course length remains unclear. The estimation of course length must consider the important trade-off between maximising short- and long-term efficacy and minimising antibiotic resistance and toxicity. ⋯ Multi-arm designs modelling duration-response curves with the possibility to drop inferior arms during the trial could provide more information about the optimal duration of antibiotic therapies than traditional head-to-head comparisons of limited numbers of durations, while minimising the probability of assigning trial participants to an ineffective treatment regimen.
-
Randomized Controlled Trial
Three randomized controlled trials evaluating the impact of "spin" in health news stories reporting studies of pharmacologic treatments on patients'/caregivers' interpretation of treatment benefit.
News stories represent an important source of information. We aimed to evaluate the impact of "spin" (i.e., misrepresentation of study results) in health news stories reporting studies of pharmacologic treatments on patients'/caregivers' interpretation of treatment benefit. ⋯ Spin in health news stories reporting studies of pharmacologic treatments affects patients'/caregivers' interpretation.