ArticleMedical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making2022
Testing for a Sweet Spot in Randomized Trials.
Article in Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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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
2 citing papers in PubMed, 4 citations in OpenAlex.
- Predictive Modeling of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in RCTs: A Scoping Review.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Potential clinical impact of predictive modeling of heterogeneous treatment effects: scoping review of the impact of the PATH Statement.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
introductionRandomized trials recruit diverse patients, including some individuals who may be unresponsive to the treatment. Here we follow up on prior conceptual advances and introduce a specific method that does not rely on stratification analysis and that tests whether patients in the intermediate range of disease severity experience more relative benefit than patients at the extremes of disease severity (sweet spot).
methodsWe contrast linear models to sigmoidal models when describing associations between disease severity and accumulating treatment benefit. The Gompertz curve is highlighted as a specific sigmoidal curve along with the Akaike information criterion (AIC) as a measure of goodness of fit. This approach is then applied to a matched analysis of a published landmark randomized trial evaluating whether implantable defibrillators reduce overall mortality in cardiac patients (
resultsThe linear model suggested a significant survival advantage across the spectrum of increasing disease severity (β = 0.0847,
conclusionSystematic methods are available beyond simple stratification for identifying a sweet spot according to disease severity. The approach can assess whether some patients experience more relative benefit than other patients in a randomized trial.[Box: see text].
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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.