What do Mass Gen­er­al, the NCI and Mayo Clin­ic have in com­mon? They rou­tine­ly blow off an FDA rule on post­ing tri­al re­sults

Two years ago, an FDA rule went in­to ef­fect re­quir­ing all clin­i­cal tri­als to re­port their re­sults on clin­i­cal­tri­als.gov with­in a year of com­ple­tion. It was meant to guard against a pub­li­ca­tion bias that can leave neg­a­tive re­sults un­pub­lished and skew the lit­er­a­ture and, by ex­ten­sion, our un­der­stand­ing of how and if drugs work.

A team at Ben Goldacre’s Ev­i­dence-Based Med­i­cines Da­ta Lab at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ox­ford just ex­am­ined how well tri­al or­ga­niz­ers are com­ply­ing with those rules, and the re­sults, at least for some or­ga­ni­za­tions, are damn­ing.

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