[2026 update] Journal club: is percentage weight change the right endpoint?

Journal club: is percentage weight change the right endpoint? — that is the question, and I have not found it answered plainly anywhere I have looked.

A question about what the numbers mean rather than what they are.

SURPASS-2 (N Engl J Med, 2021) reports its primary result in relative terms, and the absolute figures are in a table two pages later. The two produce very different impressions of the same finding.

I would like to work through which one belongs in a summary, and why the answer is not simply "both".

Building on post #4 rather than restating it.

The most common failure mode is spending fifty minutes on the effect size and ten on the population. Reversing that ratio would improve most sessions.

That is all the detail I have. Someone else will have more.

Reading back through, this was answered upthread and I missed it. My fault.

The figures usually contain the finding and the text usually contains the interpretation. Separating them for the first twenty minutes is a discipline worth keeping.

It reads as pedantry until the day it does not.

Worth separating two things that post #46 runs together.

Reading order that works for these sessions: registry entry, methods, baseline table, primary result, then abstract last. Reading the abstract first anchors everything that follows.

The figures usually contain the finding and the text usually contains the interpretation. Separating them for the first twenty minutes is a discipline worth keeping.

Reading order that works for these sessions: registry entry, methods, baseline table, primary result, then abstract last. Reading the abstract first anchors everything that follows.

The arithmetic in post #93 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.

The baseline characteristics table is the single most useful page for the questions that get asked here, because it tells you who the result applies to.

SURMOUNT-1 (N Engl J Med 2022): Tirzepatide obesity trial. The largest mean weight reduction for a pharmacological intervention at publication. Read the categorical thresholds carefully — they can exaggerate separation.

Adding it in case it saves somebody the afternoon it cost me.