Editor’s presentation

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the cornerstone of modern evidence-based medicine and constitute the most robust means of evaluating whether a treatment improves health. Evaluating the applicability of a clinical trial to a specific patient is a different story and is challenging: it is a difficult job for the clinician to judge whether an individual patient is similar enough to those who benefited in a clinical trial for the results to be applicable. This may constitute one of the reasons for the poor implementation of recommended guidelines in daily clinical activity.1 A novel framework, the Trial Score, was created to assess the similarity of the participants in an RCT (such as those enrolled in the SPRINT trial2) and individual patients. The approach is rooted in calculating the distance in the mathematical sense – Euclidian distance – between a hypothetical average participant in a RCT and a patient who might be considered for treatment based on that RCT’s results. Emphasis on making the score very easy to use would be a logical next step, in addition to vetting whether this can be extended successfully to other clinical trials.