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ForumsPublic SquareDoes anyone else feel like they are in a secret club now — November 2025

Does anyone else feel like they are in a secret club now — November 2025

julia.endo Sun, Oct 6, 2024 at 8:55 PM 15 replies 1,920 viewsPage 1 of 3
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julia.endo
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Oct 6, 2024 at 8:55 PM#1

Collecting this in one place because it comes up every few weeks and the answer is always assembled from scratch. It is about the trial evidence, and it is deliberately narrow — everything I am not confident about is marked as such.

What is actually established

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.

The condition it depends on

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.

The practical version

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.

What I am not sure about

The narrow version of the question is how to read a result like this without either dismissing it or over-reading it, since the summaries all read like press releases. If the honest answer is that nobody knows, that is a useful answer and I would rather have it.

— julia.endo · corrections welcome and will be edited into this post with credit
11 14anna.melb_AU, mark_tokyo, hans_munich and 8 others
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TirzTom
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Oct 6, 2024 at 9:49 PM#2
julia.endo said:
The gap between trial results and real-world results is consistent and it is not fraud.

julia.endo has the substance of this right. The condition it depends on is worth stating. Read four things before the headline number. The population, because trial populations are selected and supported in ways that real cohorts are not. The comparator, because "better than placebo" and "better than the current standard" are different claims and get reported identically. The primary endpoint as pre-registered, because a secondary endpoint promoted after the fact is a hypothesis rather than a finding. And the completion rate, because a large effect in the half of participants who finished is a different result from a large effect in everybody enrolled.

12 15tom_AK, josh_phd_bmore, roxy_nash and 9 others
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PharmD_Rodriguez
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Oct 6, 2024 at 10:43 PM#3
julia.endo said:
The gap between trial results and real-world results is consistent and it is not fraud.

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. 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.

Ask again with the specifics and you will get a better answer than this one.

Last edited: Oct 7, 2024 at 3:43 AM
13 16robert_kc, dan_philly, MeganSA_TX and 10 others
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Dr.GutHealth
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Oct 6, 2024 at 11:37 PM#4

Answering the narrow version, because the broad one does not have a single answer. 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.

14 17Dr.RaviCardio, jennifer_SEA, tyler_CSCS and 11 others
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Dr.EndoIndy
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Oct 7, 2024 at 4:42 AM#5
TirzTom said:
Read four things before the headline number.

This is my experience too, for whatever a second data point is worth.

15 18SandraNC_45, Dr.EndoIndy, tom_AK and 12 others
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