Posting this under the heading it deserves: Journal club: STEP 8 and the fairness of the comparator dose — a second dataset Everything below is what sits behind that.
Posting a small dataset on STEP 8. It is mine, it is uncontrolled, and the method is stated so it can be discounted appropriately.
What I would like is not agreement but a second dataset collected by someone with no stake in mine. If one exists I would rather read it than argue for this one.
Post #4 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
The version of STEP 8 that circulates here is a simplification of a simplification. It is not wrong, but it has lost the conditions under which it holds, and those conditions are where the interesting cases live.
I have no financial interest in anything named in this thread and I want to say so before I comment on STEP 8, because it is the sort of subject where it matters.
The most common failure mode is spending fifty minutes on the effect size and ten on the population. Reversing that ratio would improve most sessions.
If someone has run STEP 8 properly I would rather read that than my own reconstruction of it. Posting mine only because the thread has gone quiet.
Sessions on negative or null results are consistently the most instructive and the hardest to get anyone to attend.
No disagreement from me. Posting only so the question does not look ignored.
STEP 8 would be much easier to settle if anyone reported the denominator. Almost nobody reports the denominator.
Post #13 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.
The figures usually contain the finding and the text usually contains the interpretation. Separating them for the first twenty minutes is a discipline worth keeping.
Not disagreeing with anyone above, just adding the bit I keep having to look up.
STEP 1 (N Engl J Med 2021): The pivotal obesity trial for semaglutide and the reference point for most subsequent comparison. Mean weight reduction was substantially larger than anything previously achieved pharmacologically.
STEP 8 is worth one more sentence than it usually gets, and the sentence is the one about how the number was arrived at.
Building on post #17 rather than restating it.
Reading order that works for these sessions: registry entry, methods, baseline table, primary result, then abstract last. Reading the abstract first anchors everything that follows.
That is a description of practice, not a recommendation of it.
STEP 8 is a good example of a question where the honest answer is boring and the interesting answers are unsupported. I would go with boring.
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