The INPULSIS enigma: exacerbations in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recently published INPULSIS studies, two duplicate randomised trials evaluating nintedanib in the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) over 1 year, reported effectiveness in terms of declining lung function, but inconsistent results on exacerbations of IPF.1 ,2 Indeed, in the prespecified pooled analysis of the two trials, the risk of an investigator-reported acute exacerbation was lower by 36% with nintedanib compared with placebo but not statistically significant (HR, 0.64; 95% CI 0.39 to 1.05; p=0.08). On the other hand, another prespecified analysis found that, after adjudication of these same investigator-reported exacerbations, the risk of a confirmed acute exacerbation was lower by 68% and statistically significant (HR, 0.32; 95% CI 0.16 to 0.65; p=0.001). Such differences in results for the same outcome may puzzle readers and even possibly arouse suspicion of selective or incorrect reporting, especially when the findings straddle the magic 5% conventional level of statistical significance. We believe such differences have a statistical explanation which shows how one result is biased and the other valid. In this paper, we describe the phenomenon of treatment effect dilution, which can lead to false non-significant effects, using the INPULSIS trials as an illustration. We also provide a contrasting example to this phenomenon using, as an illustration, the case of the risk of pneumonia in trials of inhaled corticosteroids in COPD. An acute exacerbation of IPF in the INPULSIS trials needed to meet the following criteria: ‘unexplained worsening or development of dyspnoea within the previous 30 days; new diffuse pulmonary infiltrates visualised on chest radiography, HRCT or both, or the development of parenchymal abnormalities with no pneumothorax or pleural effusion (new ground-glass opacities) since the preceding visit and exclusion of any known causes of acute worsening, including infection, left heart failure, PE and any identifiable cause of acute lung injury, in accordance …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".