Abstract:

This review critically analyzes the article ‘The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The review will summarize the article by providing the purpose for the article, how research was conducted, the results and other pertinent information from the article. The review will also critique the article analyze the article’s accessibility and credibility based on its relevance to the subject matter. It will highlight some relevant progress in the topic under study that might have occurred since the article was published.

The article was well written, clear and relevant to the challenges facing the clinical research industry. Missing data points threaten the validity of many clinical trials. At the request of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and with its funding, the panel on the handling of missing data in clinical trials was created by the National Research Council's (NRC) Committee on National Statistics. This panel published a report with recommendations that was intended to be used by the FDA for guidance on handling missing data for the entire clinical trial community so that the latter can take measures to improve the conduct and analysis of clinical trials. The current article provides an overview of the findings and recommendations of the resultant report from the perspective of one member of the NRC panel.

Overall the paper succinctly summarizes issues related to missing data and the current state of challenges pertaining to the topic. It creates an understanding of the topic for the reader by discussing some of the main recommendations from the NRC panel’s report on this topic.

References:

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[2.] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1213388, viewed 19October, 2013

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