Causal relationships between pain, medical treatments, and knee osteoarthritis: a graphical causal model to guide analyses.

Overview

abstract

OBJECTIVE: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are a gold standard for estimating benefits of clinical interventions, but their decision-making utility can be limited by relatively short follow-up time. Longer-term follow-up of RCT participants is essential to support treatment decisions. However, as time from randomization accrues, loss to follow-up and competing events can introduce biases and requires covariate adjustment even for intention-to-treat effects. We describe a process for synthesizing expert knowledge and apply this to long-term follow-up of an RCT of treatments for meniscal tear in patients with knee osteoarthritis. METHODS: We identified 2 post-randomization events likely to impact accurate assessment of pain outcomes beyond 5 years in trial participants: loss to follow-up and total knee replacement (TKR). We conducted literature searches for covariates related to pain and TKR in individuals with knee osteoarthritis, and combined these with expert input. We synthesized the evidence into graphical models. RESULTS: We identified 94 potential covariates potentially related to pain and/or TKR among individuals with knee osteoarthritis. Of these, 46 were identified in the literature review and 48 by expert panelists. We determined that adjustment for 50 covariates may be required to estimate the long-term effects of knee osteoarthritis treatments on pain. CONCLUSION: We present a process for combining literature reviews with expert input to synthesize existing knowledge and improve covariate selection. We apply this process to the long-term follow-up of a randomized trial and show that expert input provides additional information not obtainable from literature reviews alone.