ArticleJCO precision oncology2024
Evidenced-Based Prior for Estimating the Treatment Effect of Phase III Randomized Trials in Oncology.
Article in JCO precision oncology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis 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
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Review article: Immunosuppression in Decompensated Autoimmune Hepatitis Cirrhosis - To Suppress or Not to Suppress?Alimentary pharmacology & therapeutics · 2026Review
- Sample size calculation in three-arm equivalence trials including a placebo for binary clinical endpoints.iScience · 2026Article
- Bayesian interim analysis and efficiency of phase III randomized trials.British journal of cancer · 2025Article
- Reproducibility of statistically significant phase III oncology trials: An In Silico meta-epidemiological analysis.European journal of cancer (Oxford, England : 1990) · 2025Article
- Survival-inferred fragility of statistical significance in phase III oncology trials.NPJ precision oncology · 2025Article
- Justification, margin values, and analysis populations for oncologic noninferiority and equivalence trials: a meta-epidemiological study.Journal of the National Cancer Institute · 2025Article
- Increasing Power in Phase III Oncology Trials With Multivariable Regression: An Empirical Assessment of 535 Primary End Point Analyses.JCO clinical cancer informatics · 2024Article
- Towards Treatment Effect Interpretability: A Bayesian Re-analysis of 194,129 Patient Outcomes Across 230 Oncology Trials.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeThe primary results of phase III oncology trials may be challenging to interpret, given that results are generally based on
methodsWe curated 415 phase III randomized trials enrolling 338,600 patients published between 2004 and 2020. A phase III prior probability distribution for the treatment effect was developed on the basis of a three-component zero-mean mixture distribution of the observed z-scores. Using this prior, we computed the probability of clinically meaningful benefit (hazard ratio [HR] <0.8). The distribution of signal-to-noise ratios and power of phase III oncology trials were compared with that of 23,551 randomized trials from the Cochrane Database.
resultsThe signal-to-noise ratios of phase III oncology trials tended to be much larger than randomized trials from the Cochrane Database. Still, the median power of phase III oncology trials was only 49% (IQR, 14%-95%), and the power was <80% in 65% of trials. Using the phase III oncology-specific prior, only 53% of trials claiming superiority (114 of 216) had a ≥90% probability of clinically meaningful benefits. Conversely, the probability that the experimental arm was superior to the control arm (HR <1) exceeded 90% in 17% of trials interpreted as having no benefit (34 of 199).
conclusionBy enabling computation of contextual probabilities for the treatment effect from summary statistics, our robust, highly practical tool, now posted on a user-friendly webpage, can aid the wider oncology community in the interpretation of phase III trials.
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.