Evidence Appraisal
Everything on Aqrab tagged Evidence Appraisal — grouped into one landing page so readers can go deeper by problem family instead of bouncing around the archive blind.
The Trial Ended. Who Made It Into the Open-Label Extension?
A denominator-first audit of long-term extension findings: trace who enrolled, who stayed, and what an uncontrolled extension can actually establish.
Twenty Patients, Thirty Events: Read the Harms Denominator
A worked trial example separates the proportion of patients harmed from recurrent events per person-time, then shows why unequal follow-up needs more than a rate correction.
A 12-Month Benefit and a 30-Day Harm Are Not One Net-Benefit Number
A fictional trial timeline shows why benefit and harm counts measured over different windows cannot be silently collapsed into one net-benefit claim.
Ninety Percent Sensitive Based on How Many Cases?
The same 90% sensitivity can rest on 20 or 200 condition-positive participants. A worked confidence-interval comparison shows why the denominator matters before a test is called reliable.
Test Agreement Is Not Diagnostic Accuracy
A worked 97% agreement example shows why matching another imperfect test cannot establish sensitivity or specificity, plus four questions for appraising the comparator and denominators.
A Negative Test Is Not a Rule-Out: Calculate the Risk Left Behind
A worked negative likelihood-ratio example shows why the same negative test can leave very different residual risks—and what to check before calling a result reassuring.
Clinical Importance: When a Significant Result Is Still Too Small to Matter
A practical guide to reading confidence intervals against a prespecified clinical-importance threshold. Separate evidence against the null from evidence that an effect is large enough to matter.
Absolute Effects: Why the Same Relative Risk Can Mean 5 or 100 Fewer Events
A practical guide to translating relative effects into absolute effects. Anchor the estimate to a credible comparator risk, keep the time horizon visible, and show uncertainty before quoting an NNT.
CONSORT 2025 for Reviewers: A Practical Checklist for Interpretable Trials
A practical CONSORT 2025 reviewer checklist for randomized trials. Find the reporting gaps that change what you can infer about allocation, treatment, outcomes, missing data, and analysis.
Estimation Over Testing: Four Habits That Quietly Break Clinical Statistics
A practical critique of four entrenched habits in clinical biostatistics — significance testing where the real question is estimation, prediction accuracy scored far from the bedside, meta-analysis on autopilot, and the false precision of point estimates that assume away what cannot be tested — with an interactive explorer that reads one trial three ways and what to do instead.
PROBAST: When a Prediction Model Paper Looks Ready Before It Earns Trust
A practical guide to PROBAST for clinical researchers. Covers participant selection, predictor leakage, outcome definition, overfitting, calibration, and what reviewers should demand before trusting a clinical prediction model.
Indirectness in Clinical Evidence: When a Good Study Answers the Wrong Question
A practical guide to indirectness in clinical evidence for clinical researchers. Covers PICO mismatch, outdated comparators, surrogate outcomes, and what reviewers should demand before trusting an applicable-sounding conclusion.
Guideline Recommendation Strength: When “Strongly Recommend” Starts Outrunning the Evidence
A practical guide to recommendation strength in clinical guidelines. Covers certainty of evidence, benefit-harm tradeoffs, patient values, implementation burden, and what reviewers should demand before trusting a forceful recommendation.
Fragility Index: When One or Two Events Carry More Confidence Than They Should
A practical guide to the fragility index for clinical researchers. Covers event-flip sensitivity, loss to follow-up, effect-size context, and what reviewers should demand before trusting a barely significant trial.
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