Introduction: Evaluating Clinical Trial Data From Schizophrenia Research

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Clinical research trials are vital to the effective and safe use of new drugs. When conducted competently and analyzed correctly, clinical trials yieldvaluable information that will ultimately be disseminated to and interpreted by physicians in clinical practice. Therefore, it is important to understand the issues raised and the questions answered by clinical trials. To that end, a group of distinguished researchers held a symposium to discuss the issues influencing clinical trial data: hypotheses and hypothesis testing, patient selection and dropout rates, study design, outcome measures, dose selection and comparator drugs, statistical analyses, and interpretations and conclusions.