Steve, will you make sure you have the proxy selection criteria posted before any proxies are collected?
The very act of looking at proxies before choosing a criteria invalidates them.
If you want to look at what Earth shatter result and how it is dealt with:-
‘A prospective randomized trial of perioperative seizure prophylaxis in patients with intraparenchymal brain tumors’
Wu et al., (2013) J Neurosurg 118:873–883, 2013.
Background
81% of neurosurgeons reported that they prescribed prophylactic antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) to patients without a history of seizures. Phenytoin is the most commonly administered anticonvulsant.
Abstract Result
The trial was closed before completion of accrual because Bayesian predictive probability analyses performed by an independent data monitoring committee indicated a probability of 0.003 that at the end of the study prophylaxis would prove superior to observation and a probability of 0.997 that there would be insufficient evidence
at the end of the trial to choose either arm as superior. At the time of trial closure, 123 patients (77 metastases and 46 gliomas) were randomized, with 62 receiving 7-day phenytoin (prophylaxis group) and 61 receiving no prophylaxis (observation group). The incidence of all seizures was 18% in the observation group and 24% in the prophylaxis group (p = 0.51)….
The prophylaxis group experienced significantly more adverse events (18% vs 0%, p < 0.01)
Conclusion
Although the lower-than-anticipated incidence of seizures in the control group significantly limited the power of the study, the low baseline rate of perioperative seizures in patients with brain tumors raises concerns about the routine use of prophylactic phenytoin in this patient population.
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So a type of drug treatment, used for 40 years to control seizures was found to do more harm than good. The results are quite stark, but no one spliced in better, feelgood, datasets.