Design issues in crossover trials involving patients with Parkinson's disease

Crossover designs are frequently used to assess treatments for patients with Parkinson's disease. Typically, two-period two-treatment trials include a washout period between the 2 periods and assume that the washout period is sufficiently long to eliminate carryover effects. A complementary strategy might be to jointly model carryover and treatment effects, though this has rarely been done in Parkinson's disease crossover studies. The primary objective of this research is to demonstrate a modeling approach that assesses treatment and carryover effects in one unified mixed model analysis and to examine how it performs in a simulation study and a real data analysis example, as compared to other data analytic approaches used in Parkinson's disease crossover studies.

We examined how three different methods of analysis (standard crossover t-test, mixed model with a carryover term included in model statement, and mixed model with no carryover term) performed in a simulation study and illustrated the methods in a real data example in Parkinson's disease.

The simulation study based on the presence of a carryover effect indicated that mixed models with a carryover term and an unstructured correlation matrix provided unbiased estimates of treatment effect and appropriate type I error. The methods are illustrated in a real data example involving Parkinson's disease. Our literature review revealed that a majority of crossover studies included a washout period but did not assess whether the washout was sufficiently long to eliminate the possibility of carryover.

We recommend using a mixed model with a carryover term and an unstructured correlation matrix to obtain unbiased estimates of treatment effect.