Abstract
I suspect that the main reason I was invited to contribute to this symposium was that the organizers believed it would be important to discuss the topic suggested by the title they assigned to me. They were aware that I have been an outspoken critic of the idea that data bases and historical control groups can be used reliably to compare treatments. Since I have already presented my ideas in writing several times, I will merely summarize them briefly here and refer interested readers to the list of references at the end of the contribution, where my previous papers as well as those of some other authors are listed.
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References
Byar DP (1979) The necessity and justification of randomized clinical trials. In: Tagnon HJ, Staquet MJ (eds) Controversies in cancer: design of trials and treatment. Masson, New York, pp 75–82
Byar DP (1980) Why data bases should not replace randomized clinical trials. Biometrics 36:337–342
Byar DP (1981) Possibilities and limitations of observational studies and evaluation of medical data bases. In: Victor N, Dudeck J, Broszia EP (eds) Therapiestudien. Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting of the German Society of Medical Documentation, Computer Sciences, and Statistics. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 528–537 (Medizinische Informatik und Statistik, vol 33)
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© 1988 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
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Byar, D.P. (1988). The Use of Data Bases and Historical Controls in Treatment Comparisons. In: Scheurlen, H., Kay, R., Baum, M. (eds) Cancer Clinical Trials. Recent Results in Cancer Research, vol 111. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83419-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83419-6_12
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