Charting the Waters of Sickle Cell Disease With Target Trial Emulation

Large administrative databases hold promise for advancing biomedical care, like sails awaiting the winds of a clinically relevant question to navigate uncharted waters.However, making best use of those data for causal questions requires careful study design and analysis.Taking the helm, Alwang and colleagues 1 have performed a multicenter, retrospective cohort and target trial emulation study (which seeks to emulate a randomized clinical trial [RCT]) to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of intravenous (IV) lactated Ringer vs normal saline in hospitalized patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) during vaso-occlusive episodes (VOEs), reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.