ArticleStatistical methods in medical research2015
Measuring continuous baseline covariate imbalances in clinical trial data.
Article in Statistical methods in medical research, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A statistical method for removing unbalanced trials with multiple covariates in meta-analysis.PloS one · 2023Pooled it
- Ideal vs. real: a systematic review on handling covariates in randomized controlled trials.BMC medical research methodology · 2019Pooled it
- Underreporting of Gender and Race/Ethnicity Differences in NIH-Funded Dementia Caregiver Support Interventions.American journal of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias · 2018Pooled it
- Homeopathy for COVID-19 in primary care: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (COVID-Simile study).Journal of integrative medicine · 2022Trial
- PSM-SMOTE: propensity score matching and synthetic minority oversampling for handling unbalanced microbiome data.Genes & genomics · 2025Article
- What happened matters: Trauma type and cumulative trauma exposure in refugee youth psychopathology.Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy · 2025Article
- Covariate adjustment in randomized clinical trials with missing covariate and outcome data.Statistics in medicine · 2023Article
- Assessing standardized contrast effects in ANCOVA: Confidence intervals, precision evaluations, and sample size requirements.PloS one · 2023Article
- Re-Analysis of the STEADY-PD II Trial-Evidence for Slowing the Progression of Parkinson's Disease.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2022Article
- Impact of minimal sufficient balance, minimization, and stratified permuted blocks on bias and power in the estimation of treatment effect in sequential clinical trials with a binary endpoint.Statistical methods in medical research · 2022Article
- Evaluating performance of covariate-constrained randomization (CCR) techniques under misspecification of cluster-level variables in cluster-randomized trials.Contemporary clinical trials communications · 2021Article
- Review
- Group sequential tests for treatment effect on survival and cumulative incidence at a fixed time point.Lifetime data analysis · 2020Article
- Choosing an imbalance metric for covariate-constrained randomization in multiple-arm cluster-randomized trials.Trials · 2019Article
- Article
- Testing for baseline differences in randomized controlled trials: an unhealthy research behavior that is hard to eradicate.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2015Article
- Continuous covariate imbalance and conditional power for clinical trial interim analyses.Contemporary clinical trials · 2014Article
- Bias, precision and statistical power of analysis of covariance in the analysis of randomized trials with baseline imbalance: a simulation study.BMC medical research methodology · 2014Article
- Covariate imbalance and adjustment for logistic regression analysis of clinical trial data.Journal of biopharmaceutical statistics · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This paper presents and compares several methods of measuring continuous baseline covariate imbalance in clinical trial data. Simulations illustrate that though the t-test is an inappropriate method of assessing continuous baseline covariate imbalance, the test statistic itself is a robust measure in capturing imbalance in continuous covariate distributions. Guidelines to assess effects of imbalance on bias, type I error rate and power for hypothesis test for treatment effect on continuous outcomes are presented, and the benefit of covariate-adjusted analysis (ANCOVA) is also illustrated.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.