Discrepancies are common between reported medical outcomes and trial registry data

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/uab-dac102015.php

Public Release: 20-Oct-2015
Discrepancies are common between reported medical outcomes and trial registry data
Study covering clinical trial publications about headaches finds significant selective reporting, suggesting potential pitfalls in peer review process
University at Buffalo

Only a quarter of publications reporting on headache clinical trials were registered in an approved clinical trial registry, a new study published Oct. 16 in Neurology has found.

That's true, despite a 2005 decision by major medical journals that they would only consider for publication results of clinical trials that had been registered in an approved clinical trial registry, such as clinicaltrials.gov. The goal was to reduce selective reporting of clinical trials, where researchers publish results that are outside the scope of the study's original design and, thus, cannot be considered scientifically accurate.

"From 2005 to 2014, we found that only 26 percent of randomized trials published in core headache journals were compliant with trial registration requirements, and that 38 percent of registered trials published results that did not match what authors initially planned to report," explained Melissa Rayhill, MD, lead author, assistant professor of neurology in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo and a UBMD Neurology physician specializing in headache medicine.

"Our study suggests that selective reporting remains a problem in the headache medicine literature and should bring into question the quality of similar reporting in other disciplines throughout the medical literature," she said.

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