Critical appraisal of a clinical trial
Once you have found a list of possibly interesting clinical trials, how do you rate them? Where do you look for understanding which one is the best for you?
ECRAN has selected some resources on this topic for you to read about.
Learn what counts in the study design and which clues you should be looking for in Health Knowledge – a 15 year old online educational website visited worldwide by millions of students, patients and professionals, which offers public health textbooks, text and video courses and disease management training.
The three sections listed below are particularly helpful and clear, have a go yourself!
- Introduction to the critical appraisal of randomised controlled trials. It should take you about an hour to complete this introduction
- CASP checklist for reading the paper critically. Use the checklist before looking at our answers!
- Guided critical appraisal of the same paper that you can work through to evaluate the answers you gave on your own. Please, note there can be more than one interpretation of some of the questions - the answers we give are only our opinion, not necessarily "The Truth".
The linked sections are by Amanda Burls, who is also an ECRAN partner.
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