July 19, 2024, by mszteh

When the answers from health research are not what you want to hear

When the answers from health research are not what you want to hear, how do you make sense of them?

Negative reactions, disagreement with the findings or disengaging with the research team will not make the results of a clinical trial change or disappear. But I have experienced all those responses when sharing results, which has prompted me to reflect on how research results are received by others.

Long-held beliefs are hard to shake off. Even more so when time or money (or both) have been invested in them. Research findings may not always match those beliefs. Health research must be meaningful, and that must mean the outcomes are important to people. So, there is a lot riding on the results.

Is the headline a true reflection?

We all may hear what we want to hear. Avoid reacting to the headline without digging into the detail. Therein lies unwarranted consequences.

Was the right question asked in the right way?

If the result does not chime with your expectation, was the research framed in the right way? And if not, what could have been done to make that better?

Have all the results been shared?

Different aspects of the research might give a breadcrumb trail to the full picture and an indication that the answer is balanced. All bits of the puzzle can help individuals to make better-informed treatment decisions.

It’s also worth remembering: a clinical study that finds something doesn’t work can be just as important as one that shows that it does work. “Negative” results can help people to avoid wasting time and money on ineffective treatments. Even inconclusive results add to the evidence base and give researchers greater understanding. And of course, each question answered usually prompts new questions.

Group or individual

Importantly, clinical study results reflect how a group is impacted by something, not an individual. Even when something is found to make a difference as a whole to those with a condition, it doesn’t mean that everyone in the trial improved – nor that whatever is found will work for all. Trial results help patients and healthcare professionals make decisions on what would be a good thing to try.

An example of this might be evidence for breastfeeding reducing the chance of atopy (asthma, eczema, allergy or hay fever) in the child. When I mention this, I usually get someone tell me it did not help their child. That was the case for me too (I breastfed both children and they still had atopy). But we don’t know how much worse it might have been otherwise.

There are so many factors which might affect eczema.

How do scientists know whether to trust their results?

Critical appraisal of Clinical Trials (free online course)

Written by Amanda Roberts

If you would like to find out more about Rapid Eczema Trials, please visit our website or email us on eczema@nottingham.ac.uk.

The Rapid Eczema Trials project involves researchers, healthcare professionals and citizen scientists (people with eczema and parents of children with eczema) working together to answer important questions about eczema by designing and running clinical trials together.

The Rapid Eczema Trials programme is sponsored by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) under its Programme Grants for Applied Research programme (PGfAR NIHR203279). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn