Pain Medicine News - Neuropathic Pain Trial Results Often Not Publicly Available, Survey Shows

Toronto—One-third of results from registered clinical trials of neuropathic pain treatments are not readily available, according to an extensive survey of neuropathic pain literature.According to Michael Rowbotham, MD, scientific director of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco, the unavailability of such a swath of trial results, compounded with selective publication bias, carry significant ethical, research and clinical implications."One problem is that the aggregating of these data tends to inflate treatment effect sizes," said Dr. Rowbotham. "If you overestimate the effect size, you really harm everyone. Physicians and patients get inappropriately high-efficacy expectations; future trials are designed to be underpowered because they're looking for a bigger effect than they really should be and from an ethical perspective, not sharing the findings wastes the contributions of patients who have entered clinical trials and agreed to the possibility of experiencing unknown risks."Congress requires clinical trials conducted in the United States to be registered on clinicaltrials.gov and that some trial results be posted on the website within one year of a study's completion. However, previous research has found only 8% to 10% of all completed trials have accompanying findings on the registry (JAMA 2012;307:651-653).To capture a snapshot of neuropathic pain–related registered clinical trials and trial result availability, Dr. Rowboth...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs