SELECT trial 4-year follow-up data released — anyone have experience?

PharmD_Rodriguez said:

Relative and absolute effects need reading together.

I read this differently from PharmD_Rodriguez, on substance rather than tone. The "earlier than weight loss explains" argument is weaker than this thread makes it sound. Blood pressure and inflammatory markers move fast and are downstream of early weight loss, so the mechanism is not as cleanly separable as the summaries imply.

Happy to go further on any of that.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. A quick sanity check on any figure quoted here: is it mean or median, is it intention-to-treat or completers, and what was the comparator. Three questions, and they resolve most disagreements in these threads.

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

Dr.CardioMD said:

The "earlier than weight loss explains" argument is weaker than this thread makes it sound.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. The gap between trial results and real-world results is consistent and it is not fraud. Trial participants get titration by protocol, scheduled contact, free drug and dietetic support; removing that infrastructure costs a few percentage points every time it has been measured. When your own curve sits below the published mean, that is the likeliest explanation before anything about you or your material.

Ask again with the specifics and you will get a better answer than this one.

Following on from ingrid_STO — and this may be the naive question:

How to read a result like this without either dismissing it or over-reading it, since the summaries all read like press releases?

Reporting back.

Update — my curve sits below the published mean and the explanation is that the trial arm had support I do not have. That was reassuring rather than otherwise.