Our Current Thinking About Attrition Bias

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Delfini Thoughts on Attrition Bias

Significant attrition, whether it be due to loss of patients or discontinuation or some other reason, is a reality of many clinical trials. And, of course, the key question in any study is whether attrition significantly distorted the study results. We’ve spent a lot of time researching the evidence-on-the-evidence and have found that many researchers, biostatisticians and others struggle with this area—there appears to be no clear agreement in the clinical research community about how to best address these issues. There also is inconsistent evidence on the effects of attrition on study results.

We, therefore, believe that studies should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and doing so often requires sleuthing and sifting through clues along with critically thinking through the unique circumstances of the study.

The key question is, “Given that attrition has occurred, are the study results likely to be true?” It is important to look at the contextual elements of the study. These contextual elements may include information about the population characteristics, potential effects of the intervention and comparator, the outcomes studied and whether patterns emerge, timing and setting. It is also important to look at the reasons for discontinuation and loss-to-follow up and to look at what data is missing and why to assess likely impact on results.

Attrition may or may not impact study outcomes depending, in part, upon the reasons for withdrawals, censoring rules and the resulting effects of applying those rules, for example. However, differential attrition issues should be looked at especially closely. Unintended differences between groups are more likely to happen when patients have not been allocated to their groups in a blinded fashion, groups are not balanced at the onset of the study and/or the study is not effectively blinded or an effect of the treatment has caused the attrition.

One piece of the puzzle, at times, may be whether prognostic characteristics remained balanced. One item that would be helpful authors could help us all out tremendously by assessing comparability between baseline characteristics at randomization and for those analyzed. However, an imbalance may be an important clue too because it might be informative about efficacy or side effects of the agent understudy.

In general, we think it is important to attempt to answer the following questions:

Examining the contextual elements of a given study—

  • What could explain the results if it is not the case that the reported findings are true?
  • What conditions would have to be present for an opposing set of results (equivalence or inferiority) to be true instead of the study findings?
  • Were those conditions met?
  • If these conditions were not met, is there any reason to believe that the estimate of effect (size of the difference) between groups is not likely to be true.
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