BMJ published
the FINE results in 2010. The FINE investigators found no statistically significant benefits to either pragmatic rehabilitation or supportive listening at 70 weeks. Despite these null findings one year after the end of the 18-week course of treatment, the mean scores of those in the pragmatic rehabilitative arm demonstrated at 20 weeks a “clinically modest” but statistically significant reduction in fatigue—a drop of one point (plus a little) on the 11-point fatigue scale. The slight improvement still meant that participants were much more fatigued than the initial entry threshold for disability, and any benefits were no longer statistically significant by the final assessment.
Despite the null findings at 70 weeks, the authors put a positive gloss on the results, reporting first in the abstract that fatigue was “significantly improved” at 20 weeks. Given the very modest one-point change in average fatigue scores, perhaps the FINE investigators intended to report instead that there was a “statistically significant improvement” at 20 weeks—an accurate phrase with a somewhat different meaning.
The abstract included another interesting linguistic element. While the trial protocol had designated the 70-week assessment as “the primary outcome point,” the abstract of the paper itself now stated that “the primary clinical outcomes were fatigue and physical functioning at the end of treatment (20 weeks) and 70 weeks from recruitment.”
After redefining their primary outcome points to include the 20-week as well as the 70-week assessment, the abstract promoted the positive effects found at the earlier point as the study’s main finding. Only after communicating the initial benefits did they note that these advantages for pragmatic rehabilitation later wore off. The FINE paper cited no oversight committee approval for this expanded interpretation of the trial’s primary outcome points to include the 20-week assessment, nor did it mention the protocol’s caveat about the “misleading” nature of short-term assessments in chronic health conditions.
In fact, within the text of the paper, the investigators noted that the “pre-designated outcome point” was 70 weeks. But they did not explain why they then decided to highlight most in the abstract what was not the pre-designated but instead a post-hoc “primary” outcome point—the 20-week assessment.
A BMJ editorial that accompanied the FINE trial also accentuated the positive results at 20 weeks rather than the bad news at 70 weeks. According to the editorial’s subhead, pragmatic rehabilitation “has a short term benefit, but supportive listening does not.” The editorial did not note that this was not the pre-designated primary outcome point. The null results for that outcome point—the 70-week assessment—were not mentioned until later in the editorial.