14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific study conducted by experts at the Paris Descartes University, it would appear that as many as half of all clinical trials that go on in the United States are not published in scientific journals once they have concluded.
The same paper reveals that many of the trials which do get published tend to omit a variety of very important details for the paper they are accompanied by. All trials that are conducted on US Food and Drug Administration-approved (FDA) medication have to be published on ClinicalTrials.gov.
PDU epidemiologist Agnes Dechartres, the leader of the study, had her team pick out 600 clinical trials at random. She found that a little more than half of all papers had been published in the database, Nature reports.
“Non-publication is a crucial problem for all stakeholders, from patients to health policy-makers. If results are not [fully] available, we can consider that research wasted,” the team leader says. She adds that not publishing the results represents a breach of confidence against patients who participated in the experimental research.