Posted by Michael Wonder on 02 Mar 2019
Treatment effects in multi-centre randomised clinical trials
1 March 2019 - It is common for treatments to be evaluated in clinical trials that involve many sites or centres, primarily because one centre rarely can enrol sufficient numbers of patients to complete the trial.
The use of multiple clinical sites introduces complexity because outcomes at different sites may be systematically different, eg, due to differences in patient populations, ancillary treatment practices, or other factors.
Thus, appropriate statistical analyses of multi-centre clinical trials consider these centre effects to yield a better understanding of the overall mean treatment effect and the variability in treatment effects and patient outcomes among sites.
