© 2000 Evidence-Based Mental Health
EBMH notebook
Assessing allocation concealment and blinding in randomised controlled trials: why bother?
Family Health International and University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA
The scientific community's quest for unbiased research received a strong boost from a recent policy amendment on randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in this journal. Henceforth, the status of allocation concealment will be clearly indicated in the abstracts along with that of blinding. Thus, readers will have additional information by which to judge the internal validity of trials. In this editorial I address the background and rationale for these enhancements.
Random allocation to intervention groups remains the only method of ensuring that the groups being compared are on an equivalent footing at the outset of the study, thus eliminating selection and confounding biases. This has allowed RCTs to play a key part in advancing medical science.
The success of randomisation depends on 2 interrelated processes.1, 2 The first entails generating a sequence by which the participants in a trial are allocated to intervention groups. To ensure unpredictability of that allocation sequence, investigators
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