New paper summarizes common clinical trial distortions

Clinical trials’ integrity and utility is routinely undermined by flaws in design, methods, publication and interpretation, a paper published in Trials concludes.

While the paper does not present new data, its summary of salient factors and the corresponding literature makes it a valuable point of departure for researchers and campaigners in the field of evidence-based medicine.

Titled “Why clinical trial outcomes fail to translate into benefits for patients”, the paper was authored by Carl Heneghan, Ben Goldacre and Kamal R. Mahtani from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford. It was published in the open-access journal Trials on 14 March 2017.