Analyzing the improvement of patients in clinical trials

Doctors must comprehend the benefits of new medicines from the perspective of patients in order to assess the relative risks and benefits of providing them to patients. To satisfy this demand, the discipline of health status assessment has grown, and various patient-completed instruments that are valid, reliable, and sensitive to therapy have been established. Such tools can give patients critical insight into how a medication affects outcomes like function and quality of life, which are often more important to patients than survival. However, for some illnesses, disease-specific health status measurements are not accessible, thus global assessments of clinical change are utilized instead. Although proven procedures for measuring global change reported by patients are available, simple ad hoc assessments are frequently utilised and can be examined from the patient's or doctor's perspective. Evangelou and colleagues investigate whether patients and doctors judge global change following experimental therapies differently in an accompanying survey of trials included in systematic reviews.