What is considered a primary method for ensuring unbiased results in clinical trials?

Randomization is a primary method for ensuring unbiased results in clinical trials because it helps to eliminate selection bias. By randomly assigning participants to different groups or treatment arms, researchers can create comparable groups that are statistically similar in terms of both known and unknown confounding variables. This means that any differences observed between groups after the intervention are more likely to be due to the treatment itself rather than other factors.

Randomization also helps avoid biases in the selection of participants, ensuring that the intervention and control groups are representative of the larger population. By mitigating the influence of extraneous variables, the results obtained from the trial are more likely to reflect the true effectiveness of the treatment, making the conclusions more reliable and valid.

While blinding, longitudinal follow-up, and statistical analysis are also important aspects of clinical trial design, they serve different purposes. Blinding reduces bias in outcome assessment, longitudinal follow-up allows for tracking changes over time, and statistical analysis is crucial for interpreting data. However, randomization is fundamentally essential for forming the basis from which unbiased comparisons can be drawn in any clinical study.