ADAPT: The Wrong Way to Stop a Clinical Trial
In his Nov. 17th editorial “ADAPT: The Wrong Way to Stop a Clinical Trial” Steve Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic blasts the NIH and PI of the ADAPT trial (a comparison of celocoxib, naproxen and placebo in Alzheimer’s disease) for terminating the trial unnecessarily. Kudos to Dr. Nissen for his bold public statements.
The actions to stop the ADAPT trial are clearly antithetical to widely accepted prinicples for conducting interim safety analyses, as I have described in a previous blog post and recently published white paper. It’s shocking that the U.S.’s leading health-research authority would be responsible for such blatant scientific misconduct. It’s the type of action that should result in a GAO investigation and in the loss of job for those found to be chiefly responsible.
