Are we become slaves of the Intent to Treat Principle?

The intent to treat (or intention to treat) principle was invented by the statistician about 30 years ago. It took a while for the clinical trial community to accept the this concept. Nowadays, the intent to treat principle has been well accepted by the people well beyond the statisticians. However, I don't think everybody really understand the concept even though he (or she) may mention the intent to treat pricinple every time he (or she) can. I have been really bothered by the comments from regulatory reviewers to suggest us to define an intent to treatment population for studies without randomization and without placebo or active control (for example, a dose escalation study). We seem to become slaves of the intent-to-treat.

In a lot of situations, the intent to treat principle is misunderstood. The intent-to-treat concept is tied with randomization for treatment allocation. No randomization, no Intent-to-treat.
The intent-to-treat concept is really for the large scale, confirmatory, pivitol studies. For very ealier stage studies (for example, the dose escalation studies) with very few subjects, there is no need to follow the intent-to-treat principle.

Intent to treat population includes all randomized patients in the groups to which they were randomly assigned, regardless of their adherence with the entry criteria, regardless of the treatment they actually received, and regardless of subsequent withdrawal from treatment or deviation from the protocol. Stricly according to the intent to treat principle, if a subject is randomized, but never receive study medication, the subject would be included in the statistical analysis; if a subject is randomized to drug A, but wrontly takes the drug B, the subject would be analyzed in treatment group A, not B (so called as randomized, not as treated); if a subject is randomized, but with no outcome measures, the subject would be included in the analysis with subject considered as treatment failure.

Intention to treat analyses are done to avoid the effects of crossover and drop-out, which may break the randomization to the treatment groups in a study. Intention to treat analysis provides information about the potential effects of treatment policy rather than on the potential effects of specific treatment.

To apply the intent to treat principle, an appropriate method for handling the missing data needs to be specified. A popular practical approach (not idea approach from statistical standpoint) is last value carried forward.

Intent to treat principle is not needed for all clinical trials and should not be interpreted as "include all enrolled subjects" or "all subjects who signed informed consent". The intent to treat is from the randomization standpoint, it has nothing to do with "study subject has intention to be treated in the clinical trial".

References:
1. ICH guidance E9 http://www.fda.gov/cder/guidance/ICH_E9-fnl.pdf
2. My presentation on ITT vs mITT http://webspace.webring.com/people/eu/um_3826/ITT_mITT_JSM2004.ppt
3. Wikipedian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_to_treat_analysis