Critical Appraisal of Therapy Articles

Therapy articles deal with interventions - things that doctors DO to patients - in order to improve/preserve their health.  

• • An intervention may compare a drug to a placebo, or a surgery to no surgery, or a new drug against another. 

  • More complicated "factorial" study designs can even look at various combinations of two or more drugs (a+b, a only, b only, or neither).

  • You might use the same critical appraisal criteria to assess whether a screening program works, or whether the routine use of a diagnostic test would improve outcomes.  Even though these studies concern diagnostic tests, they are best evaluated using the same study designs that are used for therapies.

    • e.g., to study whether we should screen for prostate, lung, ovarian or colorectal cancer, the NIH has sponsored the PLCO trial, which randomizes patients to screening for each of these versus not screening.  PLCO trial.

    • e.g., to study whether we should use beta-natriuretic peptide to help diagnose patients with shortness of breath in the emergency room, an trial was performed where some patients were randomized to using BNP for diagnosis vs. not.  Link.

• See the links below for descriptions of the three study-specific parts of critical appraisal of therapy studies and some instructional videos.

Video Tutorials