The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. A quick sanity check on any figure quoted here: is it mean or median, is it intention-to-treat or completers, and what was the comparator. Three questions, and they resolve most disagreements in these threads.
Following on from PharmHunterJen — and this may be the naive question:
How to read a result like this without either dismissing it or over-reading it, since the summaries all read like press releases?
raj_cambridge said:A quick sanity check on any figure quoted here: is it mean or median, is it intention-to-treat or completers, and what was the comparator.
Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. The gap between trial results and real-world results is consistent and it is not fraud. Trial participants get titration by protocol, scheduled contact, free drug and dietetic support; removing that infrastructure costs a few percentage points every time it has been measured. When your own curve sits below the published mean, that is the likeliest explanation before anything about you or your material.
Worth separating that from the trial evidence, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.
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Shop Reference StandardsClosing the loop on my own question.
Follow-up: I read the paper rather than the summary and the qualifier I was missing was in the second paragraph of the results.
jim_asheville said:The gap between trial results and real-world results is consistent and it is not fraud.
Liver ultrasound comparison for liver and MASH: my hepatologist ordered serial ultrasounds to track NAFLD regression.
Baseline: "Moderate hepatic steatosis, liver span 17.2cm, echogenic texture consistent with fat infiltration"
Month 8: "Mild steatosis, liver span 15.8cm, improved echogenicity"
Month 14: "Minimal to no steatosis, normal liver span 14.5cm, normal echotexture"
My liver literally shrank and de-fattened. The ultrasound tech said she's seen this pattern increasingly in GLP-1 patients and it's remarkable how consistently the fatty liver resolves.