Join us on December 4th for another exciting talk in our Fall 2024 CTML Seminar Series! Louise Oesterby Jespersen & Silje Post Stroem's talk "Investigation of the Average Treatment Effect of Interest in the Presence of Rescue Medication in a Randomized Clinical Trial" will take place at 11:00AM at Berkeley Way West, 5th Floor, Room 5401.
Clinical study participants often experience worsening of symptoms or even insufficient therapeutic effects in RCTs and in response, participants might start non-randomised disease targeting medication also referred to as rescue medication. As participants often initialize rescue medication based on a biomarker value exceeding some threshold, it is evident that the participants receiving rescue medication are a highly selected group, which introduces bias. Following recommendations by authorities, it is of interest in RCTs to estimate the treatment effect in the hypothetical scenario where rescue medication is not available. In this talk, we present the standard approach for estimating the treatment effect in clinical trials, discuss the limitations and suggest some alternative methods within mediation analysis to handle this issue.