Revisiting: Journal club: SURMOUNT-OSA and a hard endpoint in a soft field posts 31–60

Two sentences on SURMOUNT-OSA and then I will stop, because the rest is speculation and the thread is better without mine.

What is documented is narrow. What is inferred from it is broad. The gap between them is where every argument here lives.

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.

A definition problem is doing most of the work in this SURMOUNT-OSA discussion. Once the term is pinned down I suspect the disagreement mostly goes away and what is left is small.

Building on post #45 rather than restating it.

Practical experience of SURMOUNT-OSA, offered as one case with the conditions stated, not as a general finding. Conditions first, because they are what make it interpretable.

That is consistent with mine, for whatever one more account is worth.

This follows post #48 rather than contradicting it.

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.

I would hold that lightly until someone with a larger sample weighs in.

I think the SURMOUNT-OSA question is answerable and has not been answered, which is a more optimistic position than most of this thread.

Everything in post #50 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.

Where the SURMOUNT-OSA reasoning breaks down for me is the step from the group result to the individual case. That step is almost never argued for.

Building on post #52 rather than restating it.

Where the group cannot agree, record the disagreement rather than resolving it by seniority. The recorded disagreement is more honest and more useful later.

It is worth checking rather than assuming, which costs nothing.

Adding a null result on SURMOUNT-OSA. I looked, carefully, and found nothing, and null results deserve posting precisely because they never are.

Sessions on negative or null results are consistently the most instructive and the hardest to get anyone to attend.

I would rather this thread reach "we do not know" about SURMOUNT-OSA than reach a confident answer that nobody can support when asked.

Taking post #56 at face value and following it one step further.

A note on scope: what I am saying about SURMOUNT-OSA applies to the case in the first post and I would not extend it further without checking.

Agreed, and I will stop repeating the version of this I had been repeating.

Adding the measurement that post #56 says would settle 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.

Adding a source would improve this post and I do not have one to hand.

Where the group cannot agree, record the disagreement rather than resolving it by seniority. The recorded disagreement is more honest and more useful later.