Aggregated News
Hundreds of thousands of patients have been exposed to potential harm in clinical trials whose results have yet to be published since their completion nearly five years ago.
This amounts to “a failure to honour the ethical contract that is the basis for exposing study participants to the risks inherent in trial participation,” says the team behind the finding.
In a paper published today in the British Medical Journal, Christopher Jones, a physician at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in Camden, New Jersey, and his colleagues looked at 585 clinical trials registered on the US government’s ClinicalTrials.gov website and officially completed as of January 2009. For 171, or 29%, of those, the team found no existing peer-reviewed publication. Although some of these had reported their results on ClinicalTrials.gov, 133 trials had no results on this site or in published journal papers.
Many medical researchers fear that studies that do not prove a treatment is effective are more likely to remain unpublished, skewing the medical literature and harming patients by giving a false impression of treatments’ efficacy. There are...
This amounts to “a failure to honour the ethical contract that is the basis for exposing study participants to the risks inherent in trial participation,” says the team behind the finding.
In a paper published today in the British Medical Journal, Christopher Jones, a physician at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in Camden, New Jersey, and his colleagues looked at 585 clinical trials registered on the US government’s ClinicalTrials.gov website and officially completed as of January 2009. For 171, or 29%, of those, the team found no existing peer-reviewed publication. Although some of these had reported their results on ClinicalTrials.gov, 133 trials had no results on this site or in published journal papers.
Many medical researchers fear that studies that do not prove a treatment is effective are more likely to remain unpublished, skewing the medical literature and harming patients by giving a false impression of treatments’ efficacy. There are...