Subjects in FDA Trials Are Not Representative of the Actual People Receiving Treatment External validity is the extent to which the results can be generalized to a population of interest. The population of interest is usually defined as the people the intervention is intended to help. Phase III clinical trials are designed to exclude a […]
Author: mikepsinn
Has Celiac Disease Been Increasing?
Between 1990 and 2010, the incidence of celiac disease quadrupled in the United Kingdom.
Potential Impact of Accelerating Research
It Feels Hopeless Problems like dementia and mental illness can seem massively overwhelming and hopeless for any one individual to make a significant impact. Billions have been spent trying to develop drugs to treat these conditions over the past several decades. However, there’s been very little progress. Indeed the prevalence of many of these diseases […]
Key Performance Indicators
Key performance indicators (KPIs) refer to a set of quantifiable measurements used to gauge a company’s overall long-term performance. KPIs specifically help determine a company’s strategic, financial, and operational achievements, especially compared to those of other businesses within the same sector. Organizational KPI
Underlying Causes of the Increase in Neurological Disorders
Billions have been spent trying to discover pharmaceutical treatments for dementia and mental illness. However, the effort has been a near-total failure to this point. This suggests that we may benefit from looking for an underlying cause and means of prevention. Most people attribute depression and anxiety disorders primarily to life-events or genetics. Dementia is […]
What We Don’t Know is Killing Us
It was recently discovered that two types of drugs significantly increase your risk of developing dementia. In two separate large population studies, both benzodiazepines (a category that includes medications for anxiety and sleeping pills) and anticholinergics (a group that encompasses medications for allergies and colds, depression, high blood pressure, and incontinence) were associated with an increased risk of […]
6 Habits of Highly Effective Organizations
If you do what other successful people do, over and over again, nothing in the world can stop you from eventually getting the same results that they do. And if you don’t, nothing can help you. So what do successful organizations do differently from unsuccessful ones? In a word, leverage. Give me a lever long […]
How to Measure and Compare Treatment Effectiveness
Measures of medication efficacy There’s a thousands of studies available at clinicaltrials.gov. Absolute risk or response difference (ARD) is the risk or percentage of responders in group B subtracted from the risk or percentage of responders in group A. For example, mortality was 2 % for drug treatment and 4 % for placebo, which gives an ARD = |-2 %|. […]
Crowdsourcing Clinical Research
The Power of Crowdsourcing In the mid-1990’s Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. Microsoft invested over a billion dollars and hired hundreds of Ph.D. researchers to build up their electronic encyclopedia. In the early 2000s, Wikipedia started out with a few thousand dollars and some volunteer contributors. At the time, no one would have believed that […]
Off Label Prescriptions
Off-label prescribing has been under scrutiny since a recent study found that medications prescribed for non-FDA-approved uses are associated with a significantly higher rate of negative side effects. It is estimated that up to 20% of all medications prescribed are for indications that are not approved by the FDA. In the study, which was published […]