Accrual monitoring in cardiovascular trials.

Prompt awareness of a high risk of accrual failure could trigger different interventions to overcome protocol-related, patient-related or investigator-related barriers to recruitment or ultimately contribute to an early stopping decision due to recruitment futility.Accrual prediction models should be included as standard tools for routine monitoring activities in cardiovascular research. Among them, methods relying on the Bayesian approach are particularly attractive, as they can naturally update past evidence when actual accrual data becomes available.