Nearly half of US pediatric trials are unfinished or unpublished, study finds

Nearly half of the pediatric randomized clinical trials registered on the US trial registry ClinicalTrials.gov were not completed or their results were not published, a study has found.1

In the study, reported in Pediatrics, Natalie Pica and Florence Bourgeois of Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, reviewed pediatric randomized clinical trials, involving children from birth to age 17, that were posted on ClinicalTrials.gov from 2008 to 2010. The researchers found that of the 559 trials registered on the site in this period 104 (19%) were discontinued early. An estimated …