Research Commentary
A hazard ratio without its population is not a finding
SELECT and FLOW both report hazard ratios below 1 for semaglutide. They enrolled different people, at different doses, for different events.
Relative risks travel because they are short. “Twenty percent fewer events” can be SELECT’s hazard ratio of 0.80 or FLOW’s hazard ratio of 0.76, and a reader cannot tell which sentence they were given. The events were not the same events.
Attach the sentence to the entry rule
SELECT required cardiovascular disease and excluded diabetes, and used 2.4 mg weekly. FLOW required type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease, and used 1 mg weekly. A commentary that blends them is doing marketing’s editing. The journal’s rule is the opposite: the population, the dose, the duration, and the endpoint stay in the sentence.
No vial at the end
Neither paper tested a buyer-reconstituted research chemical. Ending this note with a product would pretend the hazard ratio was a shopping result. It was a count of prespecified clinical events under a protocol. The protocols are the citations.