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Target trial emulation of cardiovascular outcome trials of medications used to treat type 2 diabetes using real-world data: a systematic review of observational studies

2025· review· en· W4411507891 on OpenAlexafffund
Wanning Wang, Wang‐Choi Tang, Michael Webster‐Clark, Oriana Hoi Yun Yu, Kristian B. Filion

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Clinical Epidemiology · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicDiabetes Treatment and Management
Canadian institutionsJewish General Hospital
FundersCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchMcGill University
KeywordsObservational studyMedicineType 2 diabetesEmulationClinical trialDiabetes mellitusMeta-analysisSystematic reviewMEDLINEOutcome (game theory)Randomized controlled trialIntensive care medicineInternal medicinePsychologyEndocrinology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Cardiovascular outcome trials are mandated by the US Food and Drug Administration to assess the cardiovascular safety of new antidiabetic medications before entering the market. However, these trials often involve highly selective populations and results may not generalize to routine practice. METHODS: Our study aimed to synthesize observational studies to assess the generalizability of cardiovascular outcome trials to routine practice. We systematically reviewed observational studies that were target trial emulations of previous cardiovascular outcome trials for dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors, glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, and sodium glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT-2) inhibitors among patients with type 2 diabetes. We searched the MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane databases for observational studies that focused on trial emulation or cross-sectional studies that reported the proportion of real-world patients eligible for completed trials. RESULTS: Nineteen studies were included in our systematic review, including four cohort studies that were target trial emulations of previous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and 15 cross-sectional studies that evaluated trial eligibility. Results between RCTs and real-world data (RWD) were concordant for all drug classes in finding noninferiority. The median eligibility percentage ranged from 13% to 31% for SGLT-2 inhibitor trials and 12% to 43% for GLP-1 receptor agonist trials. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that, while RCTs and RWD are concordant in their estimates, the trials lack representativeness. More research is needed on the emulation of cardiovascular outcome trials using RWD to understand how different emulation methods may impact findings.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Direct model labels (unvalidated)

Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.

Model armCategoriesStudy designConfidence
gemmano category
Domain: not available · Genre: Review
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Systematic reviewlow
gptMeta-epidemiology (broad)
Domain: not available · Genre: Review
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Systematic reviewmedium
models splitAgreement compares identical category sets and study designs across arms.

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.167
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.481
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (broad)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: Systematic review
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.983
Threshold uncertainty score0.884

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1670.481
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0170.016
Bibliometrics0.0210.018
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0060.006
Open science0.0040.004
Research integrity0.0040.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.870
GPT teacher head0.664
Teacher spread0.205 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Labeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.

Meta-epidemiology (broad)

The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.

Study designSystematic review
Domainnot available
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations6
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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