MedNexus
2026年 · 第64卷第08期
MedNexus
Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for evaluating the efficacy of new drugs, but they often face practical challenges such as enrollment difficulties and ethical controversies in the field of pediatrics. The pediatric disease spectrum contains a large number of rare diseases, the base of children is small and scattered, and the cycle of recruiting a sufficient number of subjects is long or even not feasible at all. Although the single-arm trial can allow all enrolled children to receive experimental treatment and avoid the ethical problems of the control group, its results lack a comparative benchmark, and it is difficult to distinguish whether the efficacy stems from the experimental drug or the natural history of the disease or selection bias. In order to compensate for the lack of comparative benchmarks in single-arm trials, researchers may introduce external control methods. External control refers to the comparative population that is not from the same clinical trial, but obtained from outside the study. According to the data source and temporal and spatial relationship, it can be divided into historical control, external control in the same period and other types. The setting of external controls not only retains the ethical advantages of single-arm trials, but also provides critical causal inference evidence for the effectiveness of drugs by comparison with external data.
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