BMJ  2007;334:127-129 (20 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.39045.396817.68

Analysis

Graphical method for depicting randomised trials of complex interventions

¹ Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Department of Primary Health Care, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF, ² Department of Primary Health Care, University of Oxford

Making the what, when, and who of non-drug treatments easier to understand would benefit researchers and readers

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Complex interventions consist of several separate components combined to produce a desired outcome.¹ Evaluation of such interventions in randomised trials will generally lead to complex comparisons between trial groups.² Moreover, text descriptions in journal articles may obscure aspects of the interventions in the trial and hinder comparison between them. To counter these problems we have produced a single image that presents the components of all interventions in the trial and compares different treatment arms. The aim is to clarify the structure of the contrasted interventions and thus aid interpretation of the trial results.

We studied 169 randomised trials of non-drug interventions in primary care published between 1999 and 2003. We searched Medline, PSIQInfo, Bioabstracts, and Embase using the free text search terms "randomised controlled trials" and "primary care" and their synonyms, and excluding the term "placebo" appearing in the title or abstract; we also hand searched reference lists of retrieved . . . [Full text of this article]

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