corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16468

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Wise J
International trials registry is missing important information, study finds
BMJ 2009 Sep 7; 339:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/339/sep07_1/b3627


Abstract:

Researchers have found that important information is missing from many trials recorded on the international register of clinical trials ClinicalTrials.gov, a publicly accessible database of clinical trials managed by the US National Library of Medicine.

Joseph Ross, assistant professor of geriatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, and colleagues sampled a cross section of trials on the registry. After excluding phase I safety trials, they identified 7515 trials that were registered within ClinicalTrials.gov after 31 December 1999 and whose record indicated trial completion by 8 June 2007.

All of the trials reported the essential information required by the registry, but optional data including the primary outcome of the trial and start and end dates were less complete. For example, only two thirds of the trials reported their primary outcome (www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000144).

Dr Ross warns, “The potential of ClinicalTrials.gov registry to address selective publication and better inform . . .

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963