Patient-relevant endpoints – the essence of benefit assessments

What are “patient-relevant endpoints”? What are the categories? What are surrogate endpoints? And what does IQWiG do with the endpoint data from clinical studies? These fundamental questions are answered in the following multi-part infographic.

Endpoints are criteria to measure the efficacy, tolerability, usefulness and harmfulness of treatments, e.g. drugs. They are shown as circled dots in the entire graph.

Patient-relevant endpoints fall into the categories of mortality, morbidity, side effects and health-related quality of life. We explain the questions behind the categories and the aspects IQWiG considers in its benefit assessments.

The following 4 pictures show what is behind the 4 categories of mortality, morbidity, side effects and health-related quality of life.

Many studies record surrogates instead of patient-relevant endpoints. The following 3 pictures explain what surrogate endpoints are, when they are useful and when they are not, why they are more common in accelerated approval procedures and why they can make study results more unreliable.

IQWiG assesses the benefit and harm of medical interventions, not only their safety and efficacy. This graph explains the difference and shows IQWiG’s approach.