Randomized trial of the effect of tailored versus standard use of the combined oral contraceptive pill is not the second largest RCT

摘要

The paper by Stephenson et al. [1] claims that it is the largest RCT of an extended combined oral contraceptive pill (COC) regimen apart from that of Anderson et al. [2]. However, with 503 recruits, it is half the size of an RCT published in April 2012 [3,4] and less than a third of the size of an RCT published in August 2012 in your journal [5], both of which also showed that the conventional regimen and the flexible extended regimens were well tolerated. I am surprised that these trials were not mentioned in the discussion.