Change from Baseline: Absolute or Percentage?
Change from baseline is a common way to measure treatment effect in many health-care research studies. For such studies measurements are taken before and after the intervention. Some examples can be: body weight before and after treatment, HbA1c before and after treatment, blood pressure before and after treatment etc. The question arises, what would be the best way to measure of the change from baseline? Two of the most commonly used methods for this purpose are: absolute change from baseline and percentage change or relative change from baseline. If we call themeasurement before exposing the intervention as ‘Pre’ and the measurement afterthe intervention as ‘Post’ then the absolute change from baseline is defined as the difference between the Post and Pre measurements. The percentage or relative change will be defined…