Sleep medicine
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Missing data, e.g. patient attrition, are endemic in sleep disorder clinical trials. Common approaches for dealing with this situation include complete-case analysis (CCA) and last observation carried forward (LOCF). Although these methods are simple to implement, they are deeply flawed in that they may introduce bias and underestimate uncertainty, leading to erroneous conclusions. ⋯ These principled strategies are compared with "complete-case analysis" and LOCF. These analyses illustrate that methodologies for accommodating missing data can produce different results in both direction and strength of treatment effects. Our goal is for this paper to serve as a guide to sleep disorder clinical trial researchers on how to utilize principled methods for incomplete data in their trial analyses.