Blinding in clinical trials, time to do it better

Developing and Validating a Sham Acupuncture Needle

“…Two forms of blinding index have been proposed for further statistical analysis of responses to blinding questions, but we do not consider that their interpretation is yet sufficiently well developed to add to our findings. 19 …”

Role of Acupressure in Symptom Management in Patients with End-Stage Renal Disease: A Systematic Review

“…Future clinical trials should consider accurate estimation of sample size based on proper power calculation, 19 adequate implementation and detailed report of allocation concealment and randomization, 20 patient and assessor blinding, 21,22 and the use of objective outcomes, whenever available, or at least of validated outcomes, 23 and should clarify and conduct the intention-to-treat analysis 18 and assess success of blinding at the end of trials 22 in order to improve quality of trials and to minimize potential bias.…”

Assessing blinding in trials of psychiatric disorders: A meta-analysis based on blinding index

“…With this ability to quantify correct/incorrect guesses within individual treatment arms of a study, while taking chance agreement into account, it is then possible to compare and further analyze blinding patterns within and across studies. Nine blinding scenarios have been proposed to evaluate and interpret the pattern of blinding (Table 1) (Park et al, 2008; Bang et al, 2010). …”

“…Using both the calculated eBI and cBI values, blinding within a study was interpreted based on one of nine blinding scenarios as shown in Table 1 (Park et al, 2008). In order to separate studies into categories, BI values of ≥0.2 were considered more correct guesses beyond chance, −0.2<BI<0.2 were random guesses, and BI values ≤ 0.2 were opposite guesses.…”