The Importance of Randomization in Clinical Trials and Avoiding Confounders

Randomization is a key element in clinical trials to avoid imbalances between treatment groups. It helps prevent confounding by ensuring that variables related to the exposure and outcome are evenly distributed between groups. Confounders are characteristics that can falsely appear to be related to the intervention and outcome. In randomized trials, baseline characteristics are not considered confounders as any imbalances are due to chance and disappear with larger sample sizes.