Doctors’ and Patients’ Global Assessments of Treatment Effectiveness

Global assessments are important measures of treatment effectiveness, especially in the absence of a reliable and practical means to evaluate outcome. But do patients and physicians agree in their assessments? To answer this question, investigators reviewed data from clinical trials that included analyses of patients’ and physicians’ global assessments of the effectiveness of an experimental treatment and a comparator (such as placebo, other active treatment, or no treatment).

Data from 240 trials involving 63 different treatment comparisons for 18 conditions were used. Patients’ and physicians’ global assessments of treatment effectiveness were similar for 62 of the 63 treatment comparisons. In subgroup analyses according to type of conditi…