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Problems in dealing with missing data and informative censoring in clinical trials

Metadata Updated: September 7, 2025

A common problem in clinical trials is the missing data that occurs when patients do not complete the study and drop out without further measurements. Missing data cause the usual statistical analysis of complete or all available data to be subject to bias. There are no universally applicable methods for handling missing data. We recommend the following: (1) Report reasons for dropouts and proportions for each treatment group; (2) Conduct sensitivity analyses to encompass different scenarios of assumptions and discuss consistency or discrepancy among them; (3) Pay attention to minimize the chance of dropouts at the design stage and during trial monitoring; (4) Collect post-dropout data on the primary endpoints, if at all possible; and (5) Consider the dropout event itself an important endpoint in studies with many.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date July 24, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 7, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from Healthdata.gov

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date July 24, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 7, 2025
Publisher National Institutes of Health
Maintainer
NIH
Identifier https://healthdata.gov/api/views/ua9y-3748
Data First Published 2025-07-14
Data Last Modified 2025-09-06
Category NIH
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 009:25
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://healthdata.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id d25339fc-60e4-4ffa-a206-b0f6648b3a4d
Harvest Source Id 651e43b2-321c-4e4c-b86a-835cfc342cb0
Harvest Source Title Healthdata.gov
Homepage URL https://healthdata.gov/d/ua9y-3748
Program Code 009:032
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 0d291055827cd50d63436068c49cf082f2e5ec5354e012c4fff13892d2475357
Source Schema Version 1.1

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