ESOC 2021 | Composite outcome measures may help assess recovery following stroke

Jesse Dawson, MD, Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK, discusses the use of composite outcome measures in clinical studies investigating stroke recovery. Composite outcomes can increase the statistical efficiency of clinical trials since multiple endpoints can be combined into a single outcome. Prof. Dawson explains that, in the context of recovery trials, creating composite outcomes can be difficult as symptoms of stroke are multimodal and because different neurological functions recover to different degrees at different rates. Combining endpoints for clinical trials of stroke recovery treatments may cause a meaningful gain in one domain to be obscured by little or no gain in another. This interview took place at the European Stroke Organisation Conference (ESOC), 2021.