Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Background
Total 4,477,000
Total £3,520,000
Cost Savings
• By using an unequal allocation ratio the
trial saved about £1 million.
• Many studies do not have as dramatic cost
difference but important savings can still
be made.
Hip Protector Trial
• In the hip protector trial a key additional
cost was the cost of the hip protectors
(about £80 per person for 3 pairs including
postage).
• The cost of controls, after recruitment
costs, was mailing out follow-up q’naires.
Estimating the ratio
• Initially we thought we would recruit 10% of
women we approached. The cost of the mailout
was about £1 a person. To recruit 100 women
would cost £1,000 (£10 per person). To follow-
up the women would be another £5 in postage
after randomisation (£15 in total). The
intervention group would cost an additional £80
(£95 in total) 95/15 = 6.3, square root = 2.51.
Ratio
• We, therefore adopted an allocation ratio
of 2:1.
• BUT recruitment costs went up to £20 per
woman therefore the ratio of costs were
4.2, square root is about 2. Therefore, our
optimum ratio still remained about 2.
Cost savings
• We estimated to have saved 10% of our
research budget by using unequal
allocation, which allowed us to mail out to
more participants (to compensate for the
unexpected shortfall in recruitment) and
follow up participants for longer.
Recruitment with fixed budget
• Increase allocation to control using saved
money to increase mail out.
» Disadvantages will increase workload for local
trial co-ordinators in terms of data entry and
data management.
Allocation Ratio - lessons
Reasons N = 58
Cost 4 (7%)
Drop-outs 5 (9%)
Pt acceptability 4 (7%)
Ethics 3 (5%)
Experience 8 (14%)
Other 4 (7%)
Not stated 30 (52%)
Dumville et al, Contemporary Clin Trials 2005;27:1-12.
‘Other’ reasons
• Expected variability differs in trial arms. Can
increase power if more patients are allocated to
group with larger SD as central limit theorum
helps improve normality.
• Comparison of two treatment arms vs a control
treatment (larger numbers in treatment arms to
increase power of treatment vs treatment
comparison).
Comparison of treatments
• We might have 3 arms: control; dose 1;
dose 2. To compared dose 1 and 2 we
would expect a muted treatment response,
and therefore, we would need larger
sample sizes to observe a treatment
effect.
A Digression
• Unequal allocation, if undertaken
randomly, STILL results in equivalent
groups in terms of equal distribution of
confounders.
• It does NOT lead to BIASED allocation.
Analysis of unequal allocation
• This is exactly the same as a trial that
uses equal allocation EXCEPT if the
allocation ratio changes part of the way
through the study. If the allocation does
change this needs to be taken into
account in the analysis.
Unequal allocation and power
• Equal allocation is nearly always most powerful
given a FIXED sample size. If the budget is
fixed this is no longer true and unequal
allocation is more powerful.
• For example, in a criminal justice trial 150 crime
hot spots were identified, but there were only
enough police resources to patrol 55 – what did
the authors do?
• They randomised 110, 55 in each group – what
a waste they should have randomised 95 to the
control and 55 to the intervention.
Summary
• Most trials have unequal costs and
probably could benefit from unequal
randomisation.
• Most trials use even allocation.
• WARNING - many grant referees do NOT
understand unequal allocation and some
see it as UNSCIENTIFIC.