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The reporting quality of abstracts of randomised controlled trials submitted to the ICS meeting in Heidelberg
Author(s) -
Herbison Peter
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
neurourology and urodynamics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.918
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1520-6777
pISSN - 0733-2467
DOI - 10.1002/nau.20076
Subject(s) - consolidated standards of reporting trials , medicine , quality (philosophy) , statement (logic) , randomized controlled trial , alternative medicine , family medicine , clinical trial , quality score , trial registration , medical physics , surgery , pathology , philosophy , epistemology , political science , law , metric (unit) , operations management , economics
Aims The quality of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is associated with bias. Thus, reports of RCTs must have enough detail of key elements of quality to enable them to be interpreted properly. This study examines the quality of abstracts of RCTs reported at the ICS meeting in Heidelberg in 2002, using the CONSORT statement as the gold standard. Materials and Methods All of the abstracts accepted for the meeting at Heidelberg were read to identify reports of RCTs. Copies of these were printed and examined to see whether they complied with the 22 items in the CONSORT statement. As these were all abstracts the first CONSORT item was changed so that to comply the title had to say it was a randomised trial. Each item was scored as not met, partially met, met. Results Fifty‐three reports of RCTs were found. Five of these were podium presentations, 14 discussion posters, and 34 non‐discussion posters. Most reports did not comply with many of the items in the CONSORT statement, lacking particularly in technical details of the methods (only one study clearly reported hidden allocation to groups), and how the results were presented (only two studies fully reported results). Only 2/53 of the abstracts complied fully with more than 10 of the items, and 30/53 did not comply at all with 10 or more. Conclusions The quality of reporting of studies at ICS is so poor that it is difficult to interpret the results. Reporting was particularly poor on the details of the randomisation and the numeric results. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.