A Timeline of the Evolution of the Intention to Treat Principle
1999
Half of trials still not observing the ITT principle
Surveys of clinical trials reported in major general medical journals 40 years after the Vienna meeting have shown that only half of the trial reports assessed had observed ‘the intent-to-treat ...
1961
Hill AB. Principles of medical statistics, 7th edition, pp 258-9.
The Figure below uses a randomized comparison of medical and surgical treatments in which some very ill patients randomized to surgery died before their surgery could be organised. Should these ...
1960
Vienna Conference on Controlled Clinical Trials, 1960
The Vienna conference (Hill 1960; Bird 2014) was not the only gathering considering developments in testing treatments, but it may well have been the first conference in which several speakers had ...
1952
Mainland D (1952) Intercurrent Events. In: Elementary Medical Statistics: the principles of quantitative medicine.
Its first mention as a methodological principle in a textbook may have been in 1952, in the first edition of Elementary Medical Statistics authored by clinical epidemiologist Donald Mainland. In a ...
1948
Medical Research Council (1948) Streptomycin treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis: a Medical Research Council investigation.
In the late 1940s, concealed random allocation was used to generate comparison groups in the British Medical Research Council’s celebrated multicentre controlled trial of streptomycin in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis ...
1944
Medical Research Council 1944, Clinical trial of patulin in the common cold.
During World War 2, the British physician Philip d’Arcy Hart, supported by his wife Ruth and Joan Faulkner, designed, conducted and reported the UK Medical Research Council’s first well controlled ...
1941
Bell JA (1941) Pertussis prophylaxis with two doses of alum-precipitated vaccine.
An early application of the principle was presented by Joseph Bell in his report of a controlled trial of whooping cough vaccine initiated in 1936 in Virginia, USA, with professional ...
1932
Martini P (1932) Methodenlehre der Therapeutischen Untersuchung [Methodological principles for therapeutic investigations]. Berlin: Springer
During the three years over which I had the good fortune of heading the extensive medical department at St. Hedwig’s Hospital in Berlin, I used every opportunity to look for ...
