Making sense of a therapeutics randomised controlled trial

The aim of this article is to help the reader to feel more comfortable in analysing a paper reporting a drug trial and ultimately assessing whether the results have relevance for their clinical practice.

As a reference paper to use as an example I have chosen the EMPA-REG OUTCOME trial reported in 2015 in the New England Journal of Medicine and the abstract from this paper is shown in figure 1.¹ Busy practitioners may have little time to read a paper in its entirety but many of the important features can be established from the abstract, leaving the main body of the paper to be referred to for further details as necessary.