Can testing clinical significance reduce false positive rates in randomized controlled trials? A snap review.

We reviewed a set of 50 publications (25 with binary outcome, and 25 with survival time outcome). 20% of the 50 published trials that were statistically significant, were also clinically significant based on the minimum clinically important risk differences (or hazard ratio) used for their power calculations. This snap review seems to suggest that most published trials with statistically significant results were less likely to be clinically significant, which may partly explain the high false positive findings associated with findings from superiority trials. Furthermore, none of the reviewed publications explicitly used minimum clinically important difference in the interpretation of their findings. However, a systematic review is needed to critically appraise the impact of the current practice on false positive rate in published trials with significant findings.