Completeness of Follow-Up Determines Validity of Study Findings: Results of a Prospective Repeated Measures Cohort Study

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 10; no. 10; p. e0140817
• Main Authors: von Allmen, Regula S., Weiss, Salome, Tevaearai, Hendrik T., Kuemmerli, Christoph, Tinner, Christian, Carrel, Thierry P., Schmidli, Juerg, Dick, Florian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 15.10.2015; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Aged; Aorta; Aortic Aneurysm, Abdominal - mortality; Aortic Aneurysm, Abdominal - surgery; Bias; Clinical trials; Cohort analysis; Cohort Studies; Completeness; Correlation analysis; Endovascular Procedures - mortality; Endovascular Procedures - rehabilitation; Endovascular Procedures - statistics & numerical data; Epidemiology; Estimates; Evaluation; Fatalities; Female; Follow-Up Studies; Heart surgery; Hospitals; Humans; Internal medicine; Male; Medical ethics; Medical research; Medical statistics; Methods; Mortality; Observational Studies as Topic; Patient care; Patients; Practice guidelines (Medicine); Precision medicine; Prospective Studies; Quartiles; R&D; Registries - statistics & numerical data; Reproducibility of Results; Research & development; Research Design; Studies; Surveys and Questionnaires; Survival; Survival Analysis; Validity; Vascular surgery; Within-subjects design; Switzerland

Current reporting guidelines do not call for standardised declaration of follow-up completeness, although study validity depends on the representativeness of measured outcomes. The Follow-Up Index (FUI) describes follow-up completeness at a given study end date as ratio between the investigated and...