What is meant by intention to treat analysis? Survey of published randomised controlled trials

Format: Texts

Language/s: English

Resource Link: View the Text

Target Audience: Further education

Short Description:

Results of a survey to document the meaning of ‘intention to treat’ analysis.

Key Concepts addressed:

Details

Key messages

Intention to treat gives a pragmatic estimate of the benefit of a change in treatment policy rather than of potential benefit in patients who receive treatment exactly as planned
Full application of intention to treat is possible only when complete outcome data are available for all randomised subjects
About half of all published reports of randomised controlled trials stated that intention to treat was used, but handling of deviations from randomised allocation varied widely
Many trials had some missing data on the primary outcome variable, and methods used to deal with this were generally inadequate, potentially leading to bias
Intention to treat analyses are often inadequately described and inadequately applied