title: The false positive therapeutic trial.
abstract: I do not know how many randomized clinical trials are positive, and how many of these trials are false positive. Still, I get the feeling that among the published ones that are positive, the majority is false positive. This article tells you how you can end a trial with a positive result even if your trial data do not or hardly support your favorite treatment. It deals with many deliberate and less deliberate biases, in the introduction, in the patients and methods section, in the results, and in the data interpretation and report.
authors.affiliation: Department of General Practice, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. Paul.Knipschild@HAG.UniMass.NL
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Knipschild
mesh_terms: D015982:Bias; D016021:Epidemiologic Studies; D005189:False Positive Reactions; D006801:Humans; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity