Ethics reporting practices in randomized controlled trials of physical therapy interventions after stroke.
Francesco Ferrarello, Matteo Viligiardi, Mauro Di Bari
PMID 29992047WHAT IT FOUND
Stroke physical therapy trials increasingly report ethics details, but key safety and consent information is often missing.
Only 21% mentioned potential harms, and just 3% reported participant compensation. Trials with higher methodological quality and later publication years provided more complete ethical reporting.
Key findings
01Ethics reporting improved over time, with conflict of interest declarations rising from 23.1% in 2004 to 76.9% in 2014.
02Critical safety information is rarely reported, with only 21.2% of trials mentioning potential harms to participants.
03Methodological quality, measured by the PEDro score, was a significant predictor of how thoroughly ethics issues were reported.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study only looked at trials published in three specific years (2004, 2009, and 2014), so it does not reflect current reporting standards. Only English-language articles indexed in PubMed were included, which may bias the results toward journals with stricter ethical reporting requirements. The authors noted that extracting data on some ethical aspects was challenging when clear statements were absent, which may have affected objectivity.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a trial's silence on adverse events means the intervention was safe. This study shows that only 38.8% of stroke physical therapy trials reported the presence or absence of adverse events, so a lack of safety data is more likely due to poor reporting than a lack of harm.