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It means it didn't help people who already had severe symptoms, but might help people if it is given to them earlier. This is actually quite well known when tr
by lnanek2 6y ago
It means it didn't help people who already had severe symptoms, but might help people if it is given to them earlier.
This is actually quite well known when treating the flu with anti-virals. My doctor has said in previous years, if I wake up with full body ache and feel like it's the flu, come in immediately and he'll prescribe anti-virals. He said if I wait, there's no point, though.
Makes sense the anti-virals might only be enough to stop viral replication if given early on before it's all over the place.
- glaugh 6y agoAnd while neither effect was found to be stat sig, the “treat earlier” group was close to stat sig (eyeballing it, it probably would have been stat sig at 90% confidence) so that’s good enough reason to try again with a larger sample size. If the effect stayed roughly similar, a larger N would lead to a smaller confidence interval that would not include a non-effect if an odds ratio of 1, and therefore be stat sig evidence of benefit. Edit: Also it looks like they didn’t find an effect overall, but if they slice the data to just those who were treated early, they’re closer to having something stat sig. Hopefully that was a pre-planned cut of the data, but either way the interpretation is still probably “Somewhat promising but needs more data.”
- zebrafish 6y agoAnd the difficulty is that RDV is only available IV, so depending on what "early" means, you would have to come in to the hospital at the first sign of symptoms.