A Focus on Evaluating Major Study Limitations in Order to Apply Clinical Trials to Patient Care: Implications for the Healthcare Team

Mary J. Ferrill, Alireza FakhriRavari, Lisa Hong, Jody Jacobson Wedret

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Background: With more than a million new biomedical articles published annually, healthcare providers must stay up to date in order to provide optimal evidence-based patient care. The concise ROOTs (relevance, observe validity, obtain clinically significant results, and translate results to clinical practice) format is a valuable tool to assist with literature evaluation. Purpose: To illustrate how major study limitations found in clinical trials might inhibit the ability to adopt the findings of such studies to patient care. Methods: Examples from published clinical trials that contain major study flaws were used to illustrate, if taken at face value, would lead to erroneous assumptions, and if adopted, could potentiallly harm patients. Conclusion: When evaluating the literature, it is crucial to identify limitations in the published literature that might reduce the internal validity, affect the results, or limit the external validity of clinical trials, hence affecting the usability of literature for patient care. This article provides examples of clinical trials that contain major study limitations with potentially erroneous assumptions. These illustrations are meant to show how important it is to delve deeper into an article before conclusions are drawn.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)597-603
Number of pages7
JournalHospital Pharmacy
Volume56
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2021

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Pharmacy
  • Pharmacology
  • Pharmacology (medical)

Keywords

  • clinical services
  • drug information
  • drug/medical use evaluation

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