Accepted answer
Only what the 2 mg arm reported, and the denominator is that arm rather than the trial. Adverse-event tables are published per arm, so the 2 mg incidence of reflux has its own numerator and its own denominator, and pooling it with the other arms produces a figure that describes nobody. Two further deductions before you use it. Subtract the placebo arm — reflux occurs in people who received nothing, and the difference is the part attributable to the drug. And check whether SUSTAIN-6 counted events or counted participants: one participant with six episodes is one row in a participant count and six in an event count, and the two get quoted interchangeably. Nothing here is medical advice.
The trial answers a narrower question than the headline suggests, and the narrowing is where the useful information is.
Placebo arms in this class are not nothing. Lifestyle-intervention placebo arms in the major obesity trials commonly lose two to three per cent of body weight, so an active-arm figure quoted without its comparator overstates the drug effect by roughly that much.
It helps to be literal here: a composite endpoint is only as informative as its least serious component. Where a cardiovascular composite combines death, infarction and stroke, ask which component moved, because they are not interchangeable outcomes.
Where a result is quoted from a conference abstract rather than a peer-reviewed publication, the numbers routinely move between the two. It is worth checking which one you are reading.
When two sources disagree, the answer is almost always in the methods section of the one you have not read.
4Minor: the trial name is hyphenated in the original publication. – Dr_Yusuf_Adeyemi 4 months ago 5Do you have a reference for the last claim? Not disputing it, just want to read it. – loss_on_drying 5 months ago add a comment