Border Zones of Evidence: How Non-evidence Based Factors Influence Evidence Generation and Clinical Practice in Stroke Medicine

The interpretation of the results of clinical trials should be done by examining the finer prints of extraneous factors such as stopping rules, interim analysis, intricacies of patient selection, and the rationale of decisions that lead to non-prespecified termination. This can be done only by critical education in the art and science of interpretation of evidence emerging from clinical trials. The pioneering pivotal studies, namely, NINDS rtPA and ECASS III trials, hold disproportionate influence in determining the contours of the subsequent fate of clinical trials and treatment guidelines. It needs to be recognized that the pooling of studies using dissimilar trial designs, notwithstanding similar patient profiles, would undermine the positive signal emerging from the studies that have used better selection methodologies to homogenize the study population

Homogeneity and the outcome of clinical trials: An appraisal of the outcome of recent clinical trials on endovascular intervention in acute ischemic stroke

Clinical trials that allow significant heterogeneity of population or interventions often result in uncertain outcomes. In this paper, we review the outcomes of five recent trials of endovascular interventions in acute ischemic stroke in the context of the neutral results of previous large clinical trials on the subject

Adult-onset Satoyoshi syndrome and response to plasmapheresis

Satoyoshi syndrome is a rare disease characterized by alopecia, recurrent muscle spasms, diarrhea, and skeletal abnormalities Adult-onset disease is reported only in five patients. Most of the reports have not characterized the nature of muscle spasm in the disease. In this paper, we report the first case of adult-onset Satoyoshi syndrome from India and the clinical and electrophysiological response to plasmapheresis