TY - JOUR
T1 - A Focus on Evaluating Major Study Limitations in Order to Apply Clinical Trials to Patient Care
T2 - Implications for the Healthcare Team
AU - Ferrill, Mary J.
AU - FakhriRavari, Alireza
AU - Hong, Lisa
AU - Wedret, Jody Jacobson
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2021/10
Y1 - 2021/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - clinical services
KW - drug information
KW - drug/medical use evaluation
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U2 - 10.1177/0018578720931750
DO - 10.1177/0018578720931750
M3 - Article
SN - 0018-5787
VL - 56
SP - 597
EP - 603
JO - Hospital Pharmacy
JF - Hospital Pharmacy
IS - 5
ER -