There are multiple papers that question the ethics of doing non-inferiority trials, because it’s probably going to end up with treatments being recommended from patients that are inferior to other treatments. And that’s where the controversies come out. The reason a lot of people liked them is that, you can get significant results with very small sample sizes. All I have to do to set it basic way down and set that criterion and way down there, and everything is going to come out significant.
Three types of trials are conducted to compare a new treatment to the standard treatment:
- superiority trials seek to understand which is superior , the new treatment of the standard treatment
- non-inferiority trials seek prove that the new treatment is not inferior to standard treatment
- equivalence trials seek to explore if the new and the standard treatments are equivalent.
To learn more about the pros and cons of superiority trials and non-inferiority trials from Dr. Helena Kraemer listen to the podcast episodes below.
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