Published in:
01-07-2010 | Healthcare Policy and Outcomes
Surgical Oncology Trials and Surgeons in the Real World!
Authors:
Waddah B. Al-Refaie, MD, FACS, Peter W. P. T. Pisters, MD, FACS, David A. Rothenberger, MD, FACS
Published in:
Annals of Surgical Oncology
|
Issue 7/2010
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Excerpt
Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are reputed to be critical to the everyday practice of surgery by providing high-quality evidence to guide, inform, and establish the standards of treatment for persons with cancer.
1,
2 RCTs are designed to minimize bias and equalize potential confounding effects of measured and unmeasured variables. To this date, RCTs remain the gold standard to assess the efficacy of alternative interventions, as enormous resources and time are expended to conceive, conduct, monitor, and complete cancer trials. The ultimate goal of this effort is to improve survival and functional outcomes of patients with cancer, but achieving this goal requires rapid adoption and wide-scale implementation of trial results into standard clinical practice. …