When a gastroenterologist prescribes a new treatment for inflammatory bowel disease, the physician is counting on the therapy having undergone a rigorous clinical trial process to prove its efficacy. But that process is prone to gaps and flaws, and one in particular: outcome switching.
Outcome switching occurs when researchers change the primary or secondary outcomes they are measuring in a clinical trial over the course of that trial. In phase 3 clinical trials for IBD treatments, researchers