Intention-to-treat analysis
Form of study design and analysis for medical studies
In medicine, an intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis of the results of a randomized controlled trial is based on the initial treatment assignment and not on the treatment eventually received. ITT analysis is intended to avoid various misleading artifacts that can arise in intervention research such as non-random attrition of participants from the study or crossover. ITT is also simpler than other forms of study design and analysis, because it does not require observation of compliance status for units assigned to different treatments or incorporation of compliance into the analysis. Although ITT analysis is widely employed in published clinical trials, it can be incorrectly described and there are some issues with its application. Furthermore, there is no consensus on how to carry out an ITT analysis in the presence of missing outcome data.
Rationale
Randomized clinical trials analyzed by the intention-to-treat (ITT) approach provide unbiased comparisons among the treatment groups. Intention to treat analyses are done to avoid the effects of crossover and dropout, which may break the random assignment to the treatment groups in a study. ITT analysis provides information about the potential effects of treatment policy rather than on the potential effects of specific treatment.
Since it started in the 1960s, the principle of ITT has become widely accepted for the analysis of controlled clinical trials.
Example
In an ITT population, none of the patients are excluded and the patients are analyzed according to the randomization scheme.
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