March 13, 2015

Clinical trial reporting still not happening

According to a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, about 20% of industry-funded clinical trials registered in the United States failed to report their summary results with no legally acceptable reason for delay. That’s obviously not good enough, and this sort of thing is why people don’t like drug companies.

As the paper says

On the basis of this review, we estimated that during the 5-year period, approximately 79 to 80% of industry-funded trials reported summary results or had a legally acceptable reason for delay. In contrast, only 49 to 50% of NIH-funded trials and 42 to 45% of those funded by other government or academic institutions reported results or had legally acceptable reasons for delay.

Um. Yes. <coughs nervously> <shuffles feet>

via Derek Lowe

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Andrew Jull

    Interestingly, we found that industry trials were more likely to be registered than publicly trials in a paper published in NZ Med J as few years back. The difference wasn’t large, but sufficiently telling to suggest pharma trials better at following the rules (although one might ask questions about following the spirit of the rules).

    9 years ago