By Manel Benlloch Guajardo and Martin Orr, Clinical Trials Statisticians at Imperial Clinical Trials Unit (ICTU) In June, members of the ICTU team attended the Critical Care Reviews meeting in Belfast. This stunning conference mixed groundbreaking critical care trials and independent editorials with the chance to experience first-hand the feeling of being in the Titanic grand staircase. A true blend of the novel and the antique. The conference delivered plenty of results but

By Victoria Cornelius, Professor in Medical Statistics and Clinical Trials The design stage of a clinical trial is my favourite part of being a medical statistician, as there is no single perfect design. Instead, it offers a chance to discover and explore differing options. One aspect that many trialists struggle with is how to size the trial. This is unsurprising, as while the basic sample size calculation is simple and quick to perform, there is a lot more to take into cons

By Dr David Hohenschurz-Schmidt, Postdoctoral Researcher in Pain Research and Trial Methods for Complex Interventions Blinding is a fundamental principle of high-quality randomised controlled trials. It involves withholding key information about treatment allocation from trial participants (and often investigators and outcome assessors). The aim is to balance expectations across study groups so that any observed treatment effects can be more confidently attributed to the inte

By Suzie Cro, Associate Professor in Medical Statistics and Clinical Trials Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for testing new medical treatments. But what about testing how we run trials? That’s where a Study Within A Trial (SWAT) comes in. A SWAT is a small study embedded inside a larger host trial to test ways of improving trial processes, such as recruitment or retention strategies. SWATs are increasingly popular. But there’s a challenge, they a

This summer, I had the opportunity to attend the 46 th Annual Conference of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics (ISCB) in Basel. It was an incredible week of learning and networking with biostatisticians from around the world. As my first academic conference, the experience was both exciting and a little overwhelming – with multiple parallel sessions running at once, there was so much to explore and absorb. The two keynote presentations particularly stood o