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Archived Comments for: Registration of noncommercial randomised clinical trials: the feasibility of using trial registries to monitor the number of trials

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  1. Searching and analysing registered clinical trial data more feasible wirh the WHO ICTRP

    Roderik Viergever, Radboud university medical center

    28 July 2014

    I read this article with interest. It is a good example of the opportunities that clinical trials registration offers for monitoring countries’ health research portfolios and informing future health research policy.

    The authors note in their article that it was a methodological challenge to acquire registration data from two different clinical trial registries, ISRCTN and ClinicalTrials.gov. (“The feasibility of using registration data to monitor the number of noncommercial trials is complicated by the use of two registers, and difficulties in accessing the data.”) In this regards, it deserves to be mentioned that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) (www.who.int/ictrp/‎) provides free access to registered clinical trial data collected by 15 national and regional clinical trial registries around the world (including ISRCTN and ClinicalTrials.gov). The ICTRP includes data on more than 200,000 trials and these data can be accessed, searched and downloaded free of charge (http://www.who.int/ictrp/search/en/).

    Roderik Viergever MD

    Competing interests

    none

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