help me understand SURMOUNT, I have read the wiki twice
Trying to get a straight answer on this: help me understand SURMOUNT, I have read the wiki twice. Relative risk reduction without the baseline rate is uninterpretable. A large relative reduction on a small absolute risk is a small absolute benefit. Open-label extensions lose their randomisation. Anybody still…
Argued for a week about a result and then read the limitations section, which conceded most of my opponent’s point.
Why comparing across trials almost never works, with the specific failure modes.
Different populations: an obesity programme and a diabetes programme enrol different people with different baseline characteristics. Different endpoints: body weight change, glycaemic control and cardiovascular events are not convertible. Different durations: 68 weeks and 72 weeks are not the same, and the curves have not flattened by either.
Different analysis populations: one paper reports intention-to-treat, another emphasises completers. Different support: some trial designs include structured lifestyle contact that no member of this board receives.
Stack those and the "X beats Y" tables that circulate here are comparing five things at once and attributing the difference to the molecule.
Why comparing across trials almost never works, with the specific failure modes.
Adding the check nobody runs — the registered protocol is public and takes two minutes to compare.
The discontinuation numbers were the most useful thing in the paper for me and they were in a supplementary table.
Correction: SURMOUNT is the obesity programme and SURPASS is the diabetes one. The figure you quoted belongs to the other one.