Applying Likelihood Method For Data Safety Monitoring

Data Safety Monitoring

Data safety monitoringFormal data safety monitoring, often performed by independent committees of physicians, biostatisticians and ethicists, has become common in modern clinical trials. Safety monitoring often includes reading of many pages of tabulated adverse events classified by body system, type and severity. Monitors look for within treatment incidence and between treatment differences in incidence that may be of concern. Frequentist statistical methodology is not appropriate for this type of surveillance due to multiplicity issues and the inappropriateness of the background repeated sampling assumption. A safety monitoring committee in an international ophthalmology clinical trial used the principle of support and support intervals based on the log likelihood function for incidence parameter conditional on the data at hand. Rates were calculated as poison random variables and support methods were used for both incidence and treatment differences.