Conservative Missing-Outcome Analyses Preserved the Chemotherapy Trial’s Primary Conclusion
The chemotherapy THC/CBD trial tested whether assigning unavailable outcomes as treatment failures changed its primary conclusion. The favorable first-cycle result remained under those conservative sensitivity analyses.
Randomization and analysis counts differed
There were 151 randomized participants, 147 who received allocated treatment and 144 in efficacy analyses. The investigators examined additional analyses including treated or randomized participants without available outcomes, assigning those missing outcomes as failures.
The sensitivity analysis tested one concern
Those alternative assumptions yielded the same primary conclusion. This reduces concern that simply excluding the small group with unavailable first-cycle outcomes created the entire favorable finding. It does not prove that every possible source of missingness or bias was absent.
The result did not expand the endpoint
The endpoint remained complete response over the first 120 hours: no emesis and no rescue medication. Sensitivity to missing outcomes does not turn that definition into absence of all nausea or establish durability over later chemotherapy cycles. It also does not remove uncertainty from a smaller-than-planned trial or establish that rare adverse effects cannot occur. Report the robustness check for the question it addressed, while retaining the treatment setting, response definition and other nonsignificant outcomes.
Related analysis: the trial’s main results and limitations.
