The National Institutes of Health provided $362 million in grants for clinical trials that enrolled at least 41,000 children over a recent three-year period — but many results were never published, a new analysis found. The results are a worrisome sign of a lack of transparency that can lead to wasted research funding.
Specifically, just under two-thirds of the 354 trials studied were registered in advance with ClinicalTrials.gov, the federal database, and just 13% of finished trials were registered within 12 months of completion, according to the analysis, which was published in JAMA. The researchers also estimated that there was just a 54% likelihood results would be published four years after grants were completed.