Inadequate description of placebo and sham controls in a systematic review of recent trials.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Poorly described placebo/sham controls make it difficult to appraise active intervention benefits and harms. The 12-item Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) checklist was developed to improve the reporting of active interventions. The extent to which TIDieR has been used to improve description of placebo or sham control is not known.

Materials and methods

We systematically identified and examined all placebo/sham-controlled randomised trials published in 2018 in the top six general medical journals. We reported how many of the TIDieR checklist items were used to describe the placebo/sham control(s). We supplemented this with a sample of 100 placebo/sham-controlled trials from any journal and searched Google Scholar to identify placebo/sh

SUBMITTER: Webster RK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6819221 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature