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Fig. 3 | BMC Medicine

Fig. 3

From: Adaptive designs in clinical trials: why use them, and how to run and report them

Fig. 3

Illustration of bias introduced by early stopping for futility. This is for 20 simulated two-arm trials with no true treatment effect. The trajectories of the test statistics (as a standardised measure of the difference between treatments) are subject to random fluctuation. Two trials (red) are stopped early because their test statistics are below a pre-defined futility boundary (blue cross) at the interim analysis. Allowing trials with random highs at the interim to continue but terminating trials with random lows early will lead to an upward bias of the (average) treatment effect

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