Oct 8, 2008
IQWiG employees receive Bill Silverman Prize
Cochrane Collaboration honours work on the handling of missing study data
The Cochrane Collaboration, a global scientific organisation, awarded the Bill Silverman Prize to four employees of the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) on 7 October 2008 in Freiburg. Katharina Biester, Stefan Lange, Thomas Kaiser, and Regine Potthast received the prize for a presentation on the handling of missing study data.
The prize, which was endowed in 2007, was awarded at the 16th Cochrane Colloquium. By awarding the Bill Silverman Prize, the independent research network Cochrane Collaboration specifically honours critical projects that, on the one hand, improve the work of the Collaboration, and on the other, help patients, relatives, and physicians make well-informed, evidence-based decisions on health care interventions. The Cochrane Collaboration's main task is to produce and disseminate systematic reviews and thus to create a scientifically founded evidence base.
Reporting standards are required
The work submitted discusses the handling of missing data in primary trials and their reporting in Cochrane Reviews (High dropout rates in trials included in Cochrane Reviews). For example, missing data can be caused by the fact that study participants drop out of a trial and the results of these dropouts are not documented and analysed. Trials with high dropout rates that are included in systematic reviews are a potential source of error and bias. For example, the harmful effect of a drug or another treatment option may be considerably underestimated if participants who experience adverse effects drop out of the trial and do not return for treatment to the hospital conducting the trial.
Katharina Biester, Stefan Lange, Thomas Kaiser, and Regine Potthast identified various approaches on how to improve the handling of such missing data in systematic reviews. One of these approaches is the principle of standardising the reporting of missing data.
Silverman demonstrated the harmful effect of oxygen supplementation in incubator-treated babies
The prize is named after William (Bill) Silverman (1924-2004), who was one of the founders of American neonatal medicine and who helped to establish the Cochrane Collaboration. Like many other Cochrane members, Bill Silverman soon earned a reputation among colleagues and patients as a critical mind, as he persistently queried the sustainability of the scientific evidence behind treatment decisions.
In his years as a clinician, he witnessed time and again that opinions and treatments that were accepted uncritically could be just as dangerous for patients as new therapies that were used without having undergone sufficiently sound testing in clinical trials. In 1954, Bill Silverman and his colleagues demonstrated in a randomised controlled trial that oxygen supplementation in incubator-treated preterm babies could lead to blindness. For many years, oxygen supplementation had been standard treatment, without ever having been sufficiently tested (see also the detailed information in the accompanying text: Why is it important for people to be "randomised” in trials?).
Precisely because of this experience, Bill Silverman was not only a practising physician, but also a dedicated author of articles and books on evidence in medicine, as well as often being a critical conscience for his colleagues. To him, criticism was a way of driving progress - both in his own work and in the work of others.
Quality of health care can only be ensured by reliable study data
The Director of IQWiG, Professor Peter Sawicki, noted: "The evidence provided by Silverman that oxygen supplementation may have harmful effects in incubator-treated preterm babies is an outstanding example of how faith in study data of insufficient quality may endanger the health or even the lives of thousands of patients. In order to ensure the quality of health care, medical measures should undergo careful evaluation, preferably before their widespread introduction. This is exactly the aim and remit of IQWiG. I am therefore particularly delighted by the fact that our staff members were awarded the Silverman Prize.”
Contact: Tel. ++49(0)221-35685-0; info@iqwig.de
