Admin said:

CompoundTalk Community Rules — Updated January 2026 Welcome to Public Square.

Agreed, and subgroup analyses deserve particular suspicion. With enough subgroups something is significant by chance, and pre-registered subgroups are a different animal from ones found afterwards.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

Admin said:

CompoundTalk Community Rules — Updated January 2026 Welcome to Public Square.

I read this differently from Admin, on substance rather than tone. I would add the less popular caveat: these trial populations under-represented several groups, older adults and the highest BMI categories among them. The results probably generalise, and "probably" should be stated as an assumption rather than dropped.

This one has a reasonably settled answer, so here it is. Relative and absolute effects need reading together. A 20% relative reduction on a high baseline risk is a large absolute benefit; the same relative figure on a low baseline risk is a small one, and press summaries almost always quote the relative number because it is bigger.

TrialNerd_Beth said:

Agreed, and subgroup analyses deserve particular suspicion.

Same position here, arrived at the long way round. 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.