With the use of registry data supplied by ClinicalTrials.gov, researchers assessed more than 100 clinical trials at random, uncovering how sponsors often provide incomplete information during the testing for safety and efficacy of medical interventions.
From the study published online in Med: “We created a random sample of trial protocols using ClinicalTrials.gov, stratifying by industry and non-industry-sponsored studies.”
“We then conducted reference searches to determine the extent to which protocols cited clinical trials with identical intervention-indication pairings that were accessible in PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov at the time of trial initiation,” the authors also wrote.
The authors deduced from their findings that clinical trial protocols tend to under-cite relevant trials and fail to document systematic searches for relevant clinical trials.
“Consequently, ethics review committees often receive an incomplete picture of the research landscape if they review protocols similar to those deposited on ClinicalTrials.gov,” the authors declared.
