For many years, researchers reporting clinical trials have been urged to replace P values with estimates and confidence intervals [10], [11]. One possible way forward might be to acknowledge that some imbalance is inevitable and, rather than ask whether there is evidence of it, try to quantify it. Every trial could report an imbalance coefficient. How this might be done is beyond the scope of this article, but one way forward might be to combine as many baseline variables as possible, using principal components analysis, standardise the first principal component, and find the difference for this between groups. Much work would be needed on the implications of this idea and the robustness of the coefficient before it could be adopted.
