Examples and critical analyses of recently published supportive care studies

The methodology of supportive care trials is specific and more complex than that of pharmacological trials. Specific guidelines for non-pharmacological clinical trials have been established and should be rigorously applied. To illustrate the specificity of non-pharmacological clinical trials in oncology, we conducted a critical analysis of two articles recently published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology. According to the CONSORT statement, we concluded that the methodology concerning randomization, sample size calculation, the blind or the type of analysis lacked precision in these articles. The pauci- and mono-centric characters highly limit the extrapolation of results of these studies.