Individual response

Nope. See this thread why even in full ITT mode trialists will make tons of mistakes when not thinking about the processes generating the RCT data. This is where the whole mistaken notion is based upon whereby simple correlations between overall survival (OS) with an intermediate endpoint magically assume the OS estimate as gold standard despite using a bogus OS estimand. The field of dynamic treatment regimes in statistics evolved to protect us against exactly these mistakes.

This mistakes valid statistical inference (ITT) with the estimand we clinicians truly want. Take for example this RCT that recently created commotion on twitter. In the ITT analysis the “colonoscopy” group is patients who got allocated to receive an invitation to undergo colonoscopy. When I discuss in clinic with my patients, we are interested on what happens if they actually get the colonoscopy. Not what happens if they receive an invitation. That’s because they won’t receive such an invitation by a trial group. We will make decisions together on whether or not to actually do the colonoscopy. And for that we need to estimate the potential outcomes of actual colonoscopy versus no colonoscopy. This is much harder to estimate than the ITT. But it is nevertheless what we actually want.

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