Cabel - Bear has written about the discontinuation of patients a number of times. Please brows through his previous posts to find the relevant information.
As I have stated many times I am not a scientist. Having said that there are many factors that could have effected the time to achieve the 250 narrow MACE events. Certainly a delay in the recruiting of patients would have the effect of lengthening the trial as patients are more likely to have an event within 6 months of having an event. So logically by slowing the recruiting for any reason one could reasonably assume that there could be a delay on the back end timing of the trial.
Whether the treated group was doing well or not is what we will be seeing when the trial results come out in just a few weeks now. Keep in mind that the trial is measuring time to first event which could be a short time, days/weeks or long time, months/years. I'm certainly hoping that taking so long to get the 250 events is weighted in favor of apabetalone doing its magic effectively.
tada