Whitepaper

In the recent past the number of clinical trials have been increased dramatically world over. There are a lot of regulations in data analysis and reporting the results. However, sometimes, statisticians pose difficulty in handling missing observations generated from clinical trials. Missing observations may happen due to various factors such as the subject could not come for follow up in a particular time point or it could be due to migration of patients from the place of treatment or it could be due to treatment failure and subject would have gone to treatment elsewhere. Thus the reasons could be anything which is beyond the control of investigator or sponsor or CRO. However, it is the responsibility of the statistician to perform the analysis in a proper way to take into account of the missing observations while doing the final analysis. The objective of this paper is to highlight the importance of handling of the missing data and a brief description of the procedures for the same.