COMMENTS AND RESPONSES Reporting Discrepancies Between the ClinicalTrials.gov Results Database and Peer-Reviewed Publications

TO THE EDITOR: Hartung and colleagues (1) examined a random sample of phase 3 and 4 clinical trials reporting results on Clinical Trials.gov and compared these results with those summarized in cor-responding journal publications. They found that the reporting of outcome descriptions, outcome values, and adverse events was highly inconsistent. We did a similar study (2) that had strikingly analogous results, although we explicitly focused on trials registered on Clinical Trials.gov published in high-impact journals. Hartung and colleagues found that 15 % of trials reported dis-crepant primary outcome descriptions between ClinicalTrials.gov and corresponding publications, whereas 20 % inconsistently re-ported primary outcome values. We found that 15 % of primary outcomes were described inconsistently between ClinicalTrials.gov and corresponding publications and 16 % of similar primary result values were discordant between the 2 sources