The Fragility and Reliability of Conclusions of Anesthesia and Critical Care Randomized Trials With Statistically Significant Findings

journals.lww.com December 21, 2019

Statistically significant results in anesthesia and critical care randomized controlled trials are often fragile, and study conclusions are frequently affected by spin.

Routine calculation of the Fragility Index in medical literature may allow for better understanding of trials and therefore enhance the quality of reporting.

We identified 166 eligible randomized controlled trials with a median sample size of 207 patients (interquartile range, 109–497).

The median Fragility Index was 3 (interquartile range, 1–7), which means that adding three events to one of the trials treatment arms eliminated its statistical significance.