…if from abysmally terrible to embarrassingly bad represents progress.
A certain subgroup of trials registered with ClinicalTrials.gov are required to report their results within one year of conclusion of study. These mandatory-reporting requirements include clinical trials of FDA-approved drugs, devices, or biological agents that have at least one study site in the U.S. In the future, this will expand to include unapproved drugs. These requirements, ideally, should help reduce publication and sponsorship bias by ensuring result availability regardless of ability to obtain publication or the desire of a pharmaceutical corporation to publish negative results.
And, so far, these authors discover that it is a tremendous success – trials subject to the mandatory reporting complied with the requirement in twice as many of identified trials as compared with registered trials that were not required to report results.
Unfortunately, twice as many was only 22% compared with 10%. So, there’s still quite a ways to go before we have full transparency in clinical trial reporting – but it’s “progress.”
“Compliance with mandatory reporting of clinical trial results on ClinicalTrials.gov: cross sectional study”
http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.d7373