What is meant by intention to treat analysis? Survey of published randomised controlled trials

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• Format Texts
• Language/s English
• Target Audience Further education
• Difficulty Introductory

Key Concepts addressed

• 2-1g All should be followed up

Details

Key messages

• Intention to treat gives a pragmatic estimate of the benefit of a change in treatment policy rather than of potential benefit in patients who receive treatment exactly as planned
• Full application of intention to treat is possible only when complete outcome data are available for all randomised subjects
• About half of all published reports of randomised controlled trials stated that intention to treat was used, but handling of deviations from randomised allocation varied widely
• Many trials had some missing data on the primary outcome variable, and methods used to deal with this were generally inadequate, potentially leading to bias
• Intention to treat analyses are often inadequately described and inadequately applied

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