Campaign for the publication of all clinical trials www.alltrials.net

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From this week’s bmj:

'Campaigners for the publication of the results of all clinical trials have launched a public petition to increase pressure on researchers, funding bodies, and institutions to take action.

They are also urging people who are thinking of taking part in a clinical trial to agree to participate only in those trials that have been registered and that promise to publish the results in full.

The initiative (alltrials.net) is backed by the charity Sense About Science, the BMJ, the Cochrane Collaboration, the James Lind Alliance (an alliance of patients and clinicians set up to identify priorities for research), Bad Science author Ben Goldacre, and the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Bond University, Queensland.'

Please take a look at the website and sign if you feel able:

www.alltrials.net 

'Patients, researchers, doctors and regulators everywhere in the world will benefit from publication of clinical trial results. Please sign the petition, which says:

'Thousands of clinical trials have not reported their results; some have not even been registered.

Information on what was done and what was found in these trials could be lost forever to doctors and researchers, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine, and trials being repeated unnecessarily on people and animals.

All trials past and present should be registered, and the full methods and the results reported.

We call on governments, regulators and research bodies to implement measures to achieve this.'

My comment - the young men who died/suffered lifelong harm when entered into a clinical trial a few years ago would not have suffered if previous research findings had been available, because the results showed the potential for such damage, yet the results had not been shared! Health research is skewed when only 'good' results for a drug/intervention are published, but studies resulting in harms are not. Openness is long overdue. This is a vital campaign.

Anonymous