Drug companies and others have an ethical and, increasingly, legal obligation to promptly report results of clinical trials to registers set up exclusively for this purpose.
In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine
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(online, 12 March 2015) researchers looked at 13,327 clinical trials that were expected to report their findings to the US clinicaltrials.gov register. The analysis found that only 13.4% met the 12-month deadline: 17% of industry-sponsored trials, 5.7% of trials funded by the government or academia and 8.1% of trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Within five years of trial launch, 38.3% of trials had disclosed their results to the US register (41.5% of industry-sponsored trials; 27.7% academia/government and 38.9% NIH).
Despite a law change in the United States to ensure public disclosure of clinical trial data, trial sponsors have a long way to go to meet public and political expectations.