Cross-sectional analysis of data from the U.S. clinical trials database reveals poor translational clinical trial effort for traumatic brain injury, compared with stroke

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an important public health problem, comparable to stroke in incidence and prevalence. Few interventions have proven efficacy in TBI, and clinical trials are, therefore, necessary to advance management in TBI. We describe the current clinical trial landscape in traumat...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014-01, Vol.9 (1), p.e84336-e84336
Main Authors: Li, Lucia M, Menon, David K, Janowitz, Tobias
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Age Distribution
Annual reports
Brain
Brain injuries
Brain Injuries - epidemiology
Brain research
Cancer
Child
Clinical trials
Clinical Trials as Topic - statistics & numerical data
Comparative analysis
Concussion
Cross-Sectional Studies
Data processing
Databases, Factual
Disease
Epidemiology
Evidence-based medicine
Head injuries
Humans
Incidence
International cooperation
Medical research
Medicine
Product development
Public health
Recruitment
Science Policy
Stroke
Stroke - epidemiology
Studies
Translational Research, Biomedical - statistics & numerical data
Traumatic brain injury
United States
Websites
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an important public health problem, comparable to stroke in incidence and prevalence. Few interventions have proven efficacy in TBI, and clinical trials are, therefore, necessary to advance management in TBI. We describe the current clinical trial landscape in traumatic brain injury and compare it with the trial efforts for stroke. For this, we analysed all stroke and TBI studies registered on the US Clinical Trials (www.clinicaltrials.gov) database over a 10-year period (01/01/2000 to 01/31/2013). This methodology has been previously used to analyse clinical trial efforts in other specialties. We describe the research profile in each area: total number of studies, total number of participants and change in number of research studies over time. We also analysed key study characteristics, such as enrolment number and scope of recruitment. We found a mismatch between relative public health burden and relative research effort in each disease. Despite TBI having comparable prevalence and higher incidence than stroke, it has around one fifth of the number of clinical trials and participant recruitment. Both stroke and TBI have experienced an increase in the number of studies over the examined time period, but the rate of growth for TBI is one third that for stroke. Small-scale (
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0084336