Clés de la lecture des résultats d'un grand essai thérapeutique de phase III

Critical reading of phase III clinical trial must follow a stringent approach. The reader has to interrogate himself about relevance of trial's questions, methodology and statistics, expression and interpretation of results, and about conclusion made by the authors. Inadequate selection criterions, frequent sub-groups analysis, early results publication, are for example frequent problems. Through two examples from literature about early stage non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment, we will illustrate these different problems and try to give some ways for the reading of a phase III trial.