Comparing methods to estimate treatment effects on a continuous outcome in multicentre randomized controlled trials: A simulation study

摘要

BackgroundMulticentre randomized controlled trials (RCTs) routinely use randomization and analysis stratified by centre to control for differences between centres and to improve precision. No consensus has been reached on how to best analyze correlated continuous outcomes in such settings. Our objective was to investigate the properties of commonly used statistical models at various levels of clustering in the context of multicentre RCTs.