[Guideline on critical analysis of urologist clinical trials].
The Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT) is the study offering the greatest scientific evidence in Medicine. Although urologists may not know how a RCT is designed, it is advisable for them to be able to analyze it critically. The present study on one hand explains the most important elements of a RCT: developing a hypothesis, internal validity, relevance of the results and external validity. On the other hand, a proposal is made as to how to analyze a RCT through the so-called "levels of information" pyramid. This pyramid has two features: (a) its interpretation requires clinical rather than statistical knowledge; and (b) as we move up its successive levels (statistical significance, results, confidence interval, clinical usefulness and usefulness in the population), the clinical information increases. Likewise, mention is made of the most common methods used to magnify the results obtained by a RCT: the assignment of greater importance to statistical significance than to clinical relevance, the graphical manner of presenting the results, or the use of variables of scant relevance from the clinical perspective.
Rodríguez
Félix Millán
FM
Servicio deUrología, Fundación Puigvert, Barcelona, España. fmillan@fundacio-puigvert.es
D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic / Q000592:standards; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014572:Urology