EDITOR— G Bugeja et al have shown that elderly people tend to be excluded from clinical research,1 a fact we can support from our own experience. We searched Medline for all articles that contained the word “elderly” in the title or abstract, and combined the results of this search with all titles mapped under the heading “randomised controlled trials” that were published between January 1966 and July 1996. This search yielded only 150 articles. We excluded 89 because they were not actual randomised controlled trials — …