  Randomised controlled trials in reproductive medicine are often subject to
outcome truncation, where study outcomes are only defined in a subset of
participants. Examples include birthweight (measurable only in the subgroup of
participants who give birth) and miscarriage (which can only occur in
participants who become pregnant). These are typically analysed by making a
comparison between treatment arms within the subgroup (comparing birthweights
in the subgroup who gave birth, or miscarriages in the subgroup who became
pregnant). However, this approach does not represent a randomised comparison
when treatment influences the probability of being observed (i.e. survival).
The practical implications of this for reproductive trials are unclear. We
developed a simulation platform to investigate the implications of outcome
truncation for reproductive medicine trials. We used this to perform a
simulation study, in which we considered the bias, Type 1 error, coverage, and
precision of standard statistical analyses for truncated continuous and binary
outcomes. Increasing treatment effect on the intermediate variable, strength of
confounding between the intermediate and outcome variables, and interactions
between treatment and confounder were found to adversely affect performance.
However, within parameter ranges we would consider to be more realistic, the
adverse effects were generally not drastic. For binary outcomes, the study
highlighted that outcome truncation may lead to none of the participants in a
study arm experiencing the outcome event. This was found to have severe
consequences for inferences, and this may have implications for meta-analysis.
