Compounds this community declines to help with, and why

Compounds this community declines to help with, and why — setting out what I have, and where I think it stops being reliable.

Comparing LEADER (N Engl J Med, 2016) with SCALE (N Engl J Med, 2015) and finding the comparison harder than it looks.

Different populations, different durations, different endpoints defined slightly differently, and in one case a different estimand. People compare the headline percentages anyway, including me until recently.

Is there a defensible way to put these side by side, or is the honest answer that there is not and we should stop?

How to research a compound with no human data: mechanistic plausibility is one input. Preclinical data is another. The honest position is that you are reasoning from theory, not from evidence, and the track record of such reasoning is unimpressive when tested against actual outcomes.

Thank you for the correction. I have edited my earlier post with a note rather than silently, so the thread still makes sense to read. The error was mine and it was the kind that comes from remembering a figure instead of looking it up.

Melanocortin agonists: mechanism involves the melanocortin-4 receptor pathway that regulates appetite. The documented adverse profile includes blood pressure elevation and erections of sustained duration, the second of which is specific enough that it is the first thing worth mentioning.

Compounds this community declines to help with, and why: there are specifics in the guidelines and they are not arbitrary. They exist because of failure modes that have happened in real people, not because of prudishness.

post #56 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.

Reading a supplier's product description as a marketing document: that is exactly what it is. The hyperbole, the mechanism written as fact, the theoretical benefits stated as established benefits — all of that is marketing. Treat it as such and separate it from evidence where evidence exists.

Worth separating two things that post #59 runs together.

Why catalogue breadth is not evidence of anything: a supplier listing 500 compounds does not make the 450 untested ones likely to work. It makes them untested compounds with supplier pages.

Research-use-only status is a legal classification, not a safety classification. It means the compound is sold for laboratory use and not for human consumption or treatment. The label does not tell you whether the molecule is safe, efficacious, or what its effects are.