Second pass at: Reading a trial's population section before its results

Second pass at: Reading a trial's population section before its results Writing it up because I had to work it out twice and would rather nobody else did.

Reading STEP 1 (N Engl J Med, 2021) 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?

The estimand: what the trial set out to estimate. Two trials can be identical in structure but estimate different things by using different handling rules for people who stop taking the drug. Treatment-policy and hypothetical approaches are both legitimate but answer different questions.

The strength of my opinion here exceeds the strength of my evidence.

The opening post answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.

Composite endpoints should be read component by component. A composite driven entirely by its softest component is a different finding from one where the components move together.

Flagging that the sources on this are thinner than the confidence in the thread suggests.

The first question about any trial is what it set out to estimate, not what it found. Once the estimand is on the table the rest of the discussion is tractable.

If this contradicts something upthread, the upthread version may well be the better one.