November 30, 2019191130

"A new report examining the first decade of study results being reported on ClinicalTrials.gov finds that there has been slow progress among drug companies and academic research centers in reporting the results of human studies, but the quality of the data may still present a larger problem. The lack of quality data is undermining efforts at transparency. … ClinicalTrials.gov is often the only place that any results from trials are shared. Of a sample of 380 trials, 58% didn’t publish their results in a journal by the end of a year’s follow-up. And there is reason to believe that sponsors may not be reporting the same data on the database as they do in publications: Among the 47 trials that reported patient deaths, for instance, the authors counted up 995 deaths. When these same trials were later published in journals, they had reported 964 deaths."