Clinical endpoint ultimate outcome

An intermediate endpoint is a clinical endpoint assessed at some stage of a study but not at its very raid. Ultimate outcome is a clinical endpoint such as survival, onset of serious morbidity or symptomatic response that captures the benefits and risks of a treatment. Admission to a nursing home could serve as an ultimate outcome in the case of a drug intended to treat outpatients with Alzheimer s disease. 

Intermediate A clinical endpoint that is not the ultimate endpoint outcome but is nonetheless of real clinical... 

Although an intermediate endpoint is associated with clinical benefit/ this benefit may be more than offset by the adverse effects of drug therapy when the ultimate outcome is considered. For example/ ventricular fibrillation is associated with increased mortality in the setting of acute myocardial infarction. The demonstration that lidocaine effectively prevents ventricular fibrillation in myocardial infarction patients at first provided a rationale for treating these patients prophylactically with this drug (7). However/ subsequent meta-analyses of several studies by MacMahon (8) and Hine (9) indicated that this use of lidocaine therapy actually worsens patient... 

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