What is a follow up period?
Monitoring a person’s health over time after treatment. This includes keeping track of the health of people who participate in a clinical study or clinical trial for a period of time, both during the study and after the study ends.
What is follow up study in research?
Definition. A follow-up study, more commonly called a cohort study, has three basic components: exposure, time, and outcome. The cohort is followed over time to determine development of the outcome. To determine incidence of the outcome, subjects who have the outcome at baseline are excluded.
Why is follow up important in research?
Follow-up is generally done to increase the overall effectiveness of the research effort. Or, it could even be conducted subsequent to the original research to ascertain if an intervention has changed the lives of the study participants. Regardless of its purpose, follow-up always has cost implications.
What is a good follow up rate?
A good rule of thumb is that <5% loss leads to little bias, while >20% poses serious threats to validity. However, even less than 20% loss to follow-up can be a problem. Considering a worst-case scenario can help determine whether loss to follow-up poses a potential threat to validity.
How do you find the median follow up time?
Survey of cancer clinical trials Seventeen (28%) specified that median follow up was calculated as the median time on study for those event-free at the end of follow-up, i.e., C|C
What is considered lost to follow up?
In the clinical research trial industry, loss to follow-up refers to patients who at one point in time were actively participating in a clinical research trial, but have become lost (either by error in a computer tracking system or by being unreachable) at the point of follow-up in the trial.
How do you reduce loss to follow up?
Since there is no way of predictiing the effects of loss to follow up, researchers do their best to reduce it by maintaining contact with participants at regular intervals, collecting contact information from friends or relatives that would know how to reach a participant should s/he move, using the National Death …
Why is it important to minimize loss to follow up in a cohort study?
Ideally losses to follow up would be minimized during the design and conduct stages of a cohort study by minimizing losses since selection via loss is required to have selection bias and the extent of selection bias is partly dependent on the degree of selection (e.g., percent lost to follow up).
How do you prevent loss to follow up bias?
The only way to prevent bias from loss to follow-up is to maintain high follow up rates (>80%). This can be achieved by: Enrolling motivated subjects. Using subjects who are easy to track.
How do you minimize selection bias?
How to avoid selection biases
- Using random methods when selecting subgroups from populations.
- Ensuring that the subgroups selected are equivalent to the population at large in terms of their key characteristics (this method is less of a protection than the first, since typically the key characteristics are not known).
What is follow up bias?
The bias that can result from this differential follow up is a type of selection bias. The enrollment of subjects in a prospective cohort study like this would not introduce selection bias, because the outcome has not yet occurred.
What level of evidence is a prospective study?
Table 3
| Level | Type of evidence |
|---|---|
| I | High quality prospective cohort study with adequate power or systematic review of these studies |
| II | Lesser quality prospective cohort, retrospective cohort study, untreated controls from an RCT, or systematic review of these studies |
| III | Case-control study or systematic review of these studies |
What level of evidence is a case report?
A case report that provides information on the diagnosis, intervention, and outcome for a single individual is level 4 evidence. Case series—articles written about a series of patients with a specific diagnosis—are also regarded as level 4 evidence.
How do you write a case report?
Case reports should encompass the following five sections: an abstract, an introduction with a literature review, a description of the case report, a discussion that includes a detailed explanation of the literature review, and a brief summary of the case and a conclusion.
What is a Level 3 study?
Level 3. Retrospective cohort study. a study in which patient groups are separated non-randomly by exposure or treatment, with exposure occurring before the initiation of the study.
What is the best research evidence?
Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses Well done systematic reviews, with or without an included meta-analysis, are generally considered to provide the best evidence for all question types as they are based on the findings of multiple studies that were identified in comprehensive, systematic literature searches.