ArticleCritical care and resuscitation : journal of the Australasian Academy of Critical Care Medicine2020
Comparative effectiveness research in critically ill patients: risks associated with mischaracterising usual care.
Article in Critical care and resuscitation : journal of the Australasian Academy of Critical Care Medicine, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Framework of Institutional Obligations for Pragmatic Clinical Trials.The American journal of bioethics : AJOB · 2026Article
- Counterpoint: the design and interpretation of blood transfusion randomized clinical trials.Blood · 2025Article
- Evolution of Critical Care Cardiology: An Update on Structure, Care Delivery, Training, and Research Paradigms: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association.Journal of the American College of Cardiology · 2025Article
- Review
- Controls, comparator arms, and designs for critical care comparative effectiveness research: It's complicated.Clinical trials (London, England) · 2024Article
- Research Priorities in Critical Care Cardiology: JACC Expert Panel.Journal of the American College of Cardiology · 2023Review
- Modeling current practices in critical care comparative effectiveness research.Critical care and resuscitation : journal of the Australasian Academy of Critical Care Medicine · 2022Article
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
Comparative effectiveness research can help guide the use of common, routine medical practices. However, to be safe and informative, such trials must include at least one treatment arm that accurately portrays current practices. While comparative effectiveness research is widely perceived as safe and to involve no or only minimal risks, these assumptions may not hold true if unrecognised deviations from usual care exist in one or more study arms. For critically ill subjects in particular, such practice deviations may increase the risk of death or injury and undermine safety monitoring. Furthermore, unrecognised unusual care seems likely to corrupt informed consent documents, with underappreciated risks shrouded under the reassuring "comparative effectiveness" research label. At present, oversight measures are inadequate to ensure that research subjects enrolled in comparative effectiveness trials are actually receiving usual and not unusual care. Oversight by governmental and non-governmental entities with appropriate expertise, empowered to ensure that current clinical practice has been properly represented, could help prevent occurrences in clinical trials of unusual care masquerading as usual care.
Indexed as
Identifiers
32389103PMC10692467What 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.