Answer first: read the primary endpoint, the comparator and the population before you read the effect size. Almost every argument on this site about a trial is really an argument about one of those three.
Duration decides what can be seen. A 68-week trial can measure weight and glycaemia; it cannot measure anything whose event rate is one per cent per year without enrolling tens of thousands.
Stated carefully, non-inferiority and superiority designs are not interchangeable. A non-inferiority result says the new agent is not meaningfully worse against a pre-specified margin — it does not say it is as good, and it certainly does not say it is better.
The cardiovascular outcome programme in this class runs to several large randomised trials — LEADER for liraglutide, SUSTAIN-6 and SELECT for semaglutide, REWIND for dulaglutide — and they are the reason the class is discussed as more than a weight intervention.
I am not a clinician and this is not medical advice; it is a reading of a published protocol.
When two sources disagree, the answer is almost always in the methods section of the one you have not read.
3The placebo-arm figure is the part everyone omits. – s_kalniete 8 months ago add a comment