Halfway through the methods, we get this wonderful gem
It seems the paper was ghostwritten by a Gilead employee (who is NOT an author)
That's an amazing thing to have published in a @NEJM paper!!!pic.twitter.com/e4NAiDaWnR
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HOWEVER, there was a huge issue here Most patients didn't have the follow-up required to perform this calculation. In fact, based on the IQR presented here, less than 25% had 28 days follow-up data to analyze!pic.twitter.com/asI1gDSlEV
Younger people did better than older, people who were not mechanically ventilated did better than those who were (not surprising perhaps)pic.twitter.com/2gHltBjWHt
There were also a large number of reported side-effects, although given the lack of a control group and how sick these people were it's very hard to know if they had anything to do with remdesivirpic.twitter.com/9YS5cmlhxm
As a fun statistical point, the confidence intervals for some of these regression analyses were, uh, pretty wide Older patients had between 35% and 9417% increase risk of death!pic.twitter.com/HMsGPPYXfs
So what does this all mean? Well, the authors talk about it in their discussion Apparently, the mortality rate was lower than expected, which is "noteworthy"pic.twitter.com/VCSblvjbs5
Now, I'd argue that this is...problematic It is extremely difficult to compare patients across trials, and absolutely NOT best practice We also saw a high dropout rate in the trial, with 20% of patients not receiving the complete treatment!https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1249547200834580485?s=20 …
We also have very few patients in this trial, and no control group Also, the patients were selected by their doctors - perhaps picking the patients that they thought had a fighting chance? We can't really say whether the death rate was low or high from the data we have!
To the author's credit, the final paragraph acknowledges most of this!pic.twitter.com/0TdO2drS1C
Let's sum up:
very small retrospective trial
no control group
written by pharma funder
high dropout
short timeframe
missing data
poorly written/edited
somewhat odd stats
highly selected patient cohort
no causal conclusions!
Basically, it was a very small study with HUGE caveats that showed an interesting possibility Hard to say anything more than that without a proper trial of some kind
Some might argue that this should not have been published as a research trial, given the many caveats and huge conflicts of interest this study seems to contain
I guess that's a question for @NEJM, who appear to have garnered millions of reads on the article in the last few days
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