ClinicalTrials.gov GLP-1 trial tracker — updated weekly

TrialTracker_MD said:

ClinicalTrials.gov GLP-1 trial tracker — updated weekly Pinned because it affects plans people have already made, not because it is dramatic.

Agreed, and subgroup analyses deserve particular suspicion. With enough subgroups something is significant by chance, and pre-registered subgroups are a different animal from ones found afterwards.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

TrialTracker_MD said:

ClinicalTrials.gov GLP-1 trial tracker — updated weekly Pinned because it affects plans people have already made, not because it is dramatic.

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. I would add the less popular caveat: these trial populations under-represented several groups, older adults and the highest BMI categories among them. The results probably generalise, and "probably" should be stated as an assumption rather than dropped.

This one has a reasonably settled answer, so here it is. Read four things before the headline number. The population, because trial populations are selected and supported in ways that real cohorts are not. The comparator, because "better than placebo" and "better than the current standard" are different claims and get reported identically. The primary endpoint as pre-registered, because a secondary endpoint promoted after the fact is a hypothesis rather than a finding. And the completion rate, because a large effect in the half of participants who finished is a different result from a large effect in everybody enrolled.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

kate.chem said:

Agreed, and subgroup analyses deserve particular suspicion.

This matches mine closely enough to be worth saying so. Relative and absolute effects need reading together. A 20% relative reduction on a high baseline risk is a large absolute benefit; the same relative figure on a low baseline risk is a small one, and press summaries almost always quote the relative number because it is bigger.