title: Understanding Treatment Effect Terminology in Pain and Symptom Management Research.
abstract: Within health services and medical research, there is a wide variety of terminology related to treatment effects. Understanding differences in types of treatment effects is especially important in pain and symptom management research where nonexperimental and quasiexperimental observational data analysis is common. We use the example of a palliative care consultation team leader considering implementation of a medication reconciliation program and a care-coordination intervention reported in the literature to illustrate population-level and conditional treatment effects and to highlight the sensitivity of values of treatment effects to sample selection and treatment assignment. Our goal is to facilitate appropriate reporting and interpretation of study results and to help investigators understand what information a decision maker needs when deciding whether to implement a treatment. Greater awareness of the reasons why treatment effects may differ across studies of the same patients in the same treatment settings can help policy makers and clinicians understand to whom a study's results may be generalized.
authors.affiliation: James J. Peters VA Medical Center, Bronx, New York, USA; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA. Electronic address: melissa.garrido@va.gov.
authors.forename: Melissa M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Garrido
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota School of Public Health, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
authors.forename: Bryan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Dowd
authors.affiliation: VA Puget Sound, Seattle, Washington, USA; University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, Washington, USA.
authors.forename: Paul L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Hebert
authors.affiliation: Durham VA Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA; Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina, USA.
authors.forename: Matthew L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Maciejewski
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D064887:Observational Studies as Topic / Q000379:methods; D059408:Pain Management; D010166:Palliative Care; D010348:Patient Care Team; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic / Q000379:methods; D015983:Selection Bias; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D016896:Treatment Outcome
keywords: Treatment effect; health services research; observational study; randomized controlled trial; selection bias; terminology; treatment assignment