BMJ 1998;316:1905 ( 20 June )

Letters

Clinical trials should be designed to include elderly people

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

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---that is, they were reviews, letters, or not trials of drug treatment. Of the 61 remaining, 50 articles dealt specifically with elderly people, the main subjects being hypertension (13 papers), neuropsychiatry (11), and cardiology (7).2

Despite this very poor return, there may be legitimate reasons why elderly people are excluded from randomised controlled trials, and although the authors of the articles we identified mention a few reasons they make no . . . [Full text of this article]
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Relevant Article

Exclusion of elderly people from clinical research: a descriptive study of published reports
G Bugeja, A Kumar, and Arup K Banerjee
BMJ 1997 315: 1059. [Extract] [Full Text]

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