Ursodeoxycholic Acid Improves Bilirubin but Not Albumin in Primary
Biliary Cirrhosis: Further Evidence for Nonefficacy
Figure 1
Reported and predicted levels of serum bilirubin and serum albumin for trials with long follow-up period. Vertical lines represent 95% confidence intervals. First (a) shows the profile of the relationship between serum bilirubin and albumin (solid line) with the 95% confidence interval (dash line) predicted by the model applied to the trial reported by Papatheodoridis et al. [16]. This trial had a baseline albumin of 36 g/L and 37 g/L for UDCA and untreated arms, respectively, and a mean followup of 7 years. As the number of patients who were initially assigned to remain untreated were crossed over to UDCA therapy at some point during the study period, the end of followup was considered the time of crossover for those patients. Superimposed on this in the figure is a point corresponding to the end of trial albumin and bilirubin level for each of the trial arms (UDCA and placebo), together with the reported 95% confidence interval for albumin. Likewise, (b) shows the corresponding results for the trial reported by Pares et al. [15], which had a baseline serum albumin of 41.9 g/L and 40.6 g/L for UDCA and placebo arms, respectively.
