FLOW and the kidney endpoints

Started 19 August 2025 · 22 replies · 202 hearts · read 3.8k times

BettinaGraz, AT · 19 August 2025

11 months ago

FLOW and the kidney endpoints — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

I have read the paper and I am not sure I have understood it.

I have read the guides on this site on this subject and they were clearer than anything else I found, and my question sits just past where they stop.

My question is about what a particular measurement does and does not tell you, because I think I have been reading more into it than it says.

I would like to compare how two different measurements answer two different questions, because I have been treating them as interchangeable.

Happy to be told I have misread it. That would be the most useful possible outcome of this post.

AmmiKarachi, PK

What I found is that the abstract and the results section quite often tell slightly different stories, and the difference is the interesting part.

GwilymCaernarfon, UK

Building on what Ammi wrote rather than answering the original question.

The thing I look at first now is who was actually in the study, because that is usually where the answer to my question lives.

PatrickLimerick, IE

Something practical: I read the methods before the conclusions now, which somebody here suggested and which changed how much I trust what I read.

SunilFacilitatorBirmingham, UK

Gently: a mechanism is not an outcome. Three replies have moved between the two as though they were the same claim.

TiborBratislava, SK

Gwilym, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

What I would say is that an honest "we do not know yet" is worth more than a confident answer, and the papers say it more often than the coverage does.

EphraimBrooklyn, NY

The trial that gets quoted most in general coverage is not the one that answers most of the questions people here actually have.

8me too 1

GilTel Aviv, IL

Something worth knowing: the follow-up periods in most of what we read are short relative to how long people actually take these things.

NissaHaifa, IL

Coming back to what Tibor wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

My favourite session here was the one where we read a paper and concluded it did not support the thing everybody had been citing it for.

JuniperMachynlleth, UK

Something worth knowing: the difference between a trial and an observational study changes what you can conclude, and I did not know that two years ago.

AnnaAthens, GR

#10

My reading has got slower and better. I get through a quarter of what I used to and I understand considerably more of it.

PamSouthport, UK

#11

Coming back to say the fortnightly rhythm has held for two years and it is the thing on this site I would least like to lose.

PetuaKampala, UG

#12

One paper a fortnight, read properly, has taught me more than three years of reading summaries of papers.

6me too 9

JunoBrighton, UK

#13

What Petua described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

The session where we read a paper about something none of us takes was the most useful, because nobody was defending a position.

OrphBath, UK

#14

Nothing here is medical advice, and a paper is not a recommendation for any individual person including the ones in it.

SaoirseKilkenny, IE

#15

Coming back to what Petua wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

I had to learn that an effect being statistically significant and it mattering to a person are two entirely separate questions.

TarqWindsor, UK

#16

I have nothing to add and I did not want to leave it unanswered.

PriyaReading, UK

#17

I found the funding declarations worth reading, not as an accusation, but because they tell you what question somebody was paying to have answered.

BlueStroud, UK

#18

Priya said something I want to sit with for a second.

The withdrawal numbers in a trial usually tell you more about tolerability than the tolerability section does.

NilsUppsala, SE

#19

What I would flag is that a study in a different population may not transfer, and that is a limitation rather than a criticism.

NadjaBelgrade, RS

#20

Reading Blue, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

Somebody here asked what would change our minds, at the start of a session, and it improved the discussion enormously.

SunilFacilitatorBirmingham, UK

#21

Closing note: this stays linked from the circle landing page. If a new study lands, come back and add it rather than starting again.

PádraigGalway, IE

#22

What helped was somebody explaining confidence intervals to me properly, once, in plain terms, and I have read differently ever since.