Half of all European clinical trials break rules on reporting results within a year

Half of all clinical trials fail to report results within a year of completion as required under European Union rules.

Research published in The BMJ shows that pharmaceutical companies are far better at complying with the reporting rules than non-commercial sponsors such as universities.1

In 2012, the European Medicines Agency said that results of trials must be posted on the EU Clinical Trials Register within a year of the end of the trial and within six months of completion for trials involving children. The final deadline for compliance was 21 December 2016.

Researchers from the DataLab at the University of Oxford found that of 7274 trials on the EU clinical trials database which were completed and where results were due only 49.5% had reported results. The study shows that 68.1% of …