Journal club: SUSTAIN 6 and its retinopathy signal — does this still hold?

The question in the title: Journal club: SUSTAIN 6 and its retinopathy signal — does this still hold? I will give what I have already checked below so nobody repeats it.

Reading SUSTAIN 6 (N Engl J Med, 2016) for the population rather than the effect, which I have not done properly before.

The baseline table is more restrictive than the way the trial gets discussed here. Several of the questions in this category come from people who would not have been enrolled.

What is the honest way to describe what the trial says to somebody outside its population?

I had written a reply contradicting post #3 and deleted it. Here is what survived.

Two things can be true about SUSTAIN 6 at once: the mechanism is plausible and the evidence for the size of the effect is thin. Most of the argument here is people defending the first against attacks on the second.

Confirming post #16 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.

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.

Adding this to the thread rather than to the wiki, because I am not confident enough for the wiki.

Sessions on negative or null results are consistently the most instructive and the hardest to get anyone to attend.

That is the honest state of it as of this week.

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.

Taking post #31 at face value and following it one step further.

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.

The baseline characteristics table is the single most useful page for the questions that get asked here, because it tells you who the result applies to.

This follows post #52 rather than contradicting it.

The most useful thing anyone has posted about SUSTAIN 6 in this category was a table of what had been measured and by whom. That is what I would want again.

One caution on SUSTAIN 6: everything above assumes the underlying documentation is what it claims to be. That assumption is doing real work and is rarely stated.