BACKGROUND The clinical effectiveness of complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) is widely debated because of a lack of clinical trials. The internet may provide an effective and economical approach for undertaking randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of low-risk interventions. We investigated whether the internet could be used to perform an internet-based RCT of a CAM fulfilling the revi...

BACKGROUND This study aimed to evaluate the quality of reports about randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of scalp acupuncture (SA) for the treatment of vascular dementia (VD). METHOD A systematic search of reports published through to December 2015 was performed in eight databases. The quality of RCTs that used SA as an intervention for VD was evaluated based on the 2010 Consolidated Standard...

This systematic review aimed to evaluate the adherence CONSORT Statement in clinical studies comparing different instrumentation techniques Endodontics. Methodology: A search was carried out through Medline databases. There no restriction on publication year or idiom. Solely randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were included. The articles evaluated compliance with CONSORT. Descriptive analyses o...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of the CONSORT for Abstracts guidelines, and different editorial policies used by five leading general medical journals to implement the guidelines, on the reporting quality of abstracts of randomised trials. DESIGN Interrupted time series analysis. SAMPLE We randomly selected up to 60 primary reports of randomised trials per journal per year from five hi...

Objectives. To evaluate the reporting quality of published randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in the Tai Chi literature following the publication of the CONSORT guidelines in 2001. Data Sources. The OVID MEDLINE and PUBMED databases. Review Methods. To survey the general characteristics of Tai Chi RCTs in the literature, we included any report if (i) it was an original report of the trial; (ii) ...

AIMS The quality of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is associated with bias. Thus, reports of RCTs must have enough detail of key elements of quality to enable them to be interpreted properly. This study examines the quality of abstracts of RCTs reported at the ICS meeting in Heidelberg in 2002, using the CONSORT statement as the gold standard. MATERIALS AND METHODS All of the abstracts a...

Aims: Guidance has been published on how best to report randomised controlled trials (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials CONSORT) and systematic reviews (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis PRISMA). In 2011, we reported a low rate of enforcement by surgery journals for submitted manuscripts to conform to these guidelines. The aim of this follow-up study is...

BACKGROUND Clear, transparent, and sufficiently detailed abstracts of conferences and journal articles related to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are important, because readers often base their assessment of a trial solely on information in the abstract. Here, we extend the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) Statement to develop a minimum list of essential items, which aut...

R eports of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the only tangible evidence of their conduct. Yet historians may well view the first 50 years of reporting of RCTs with some surprise. They will encounter what might be described as a cognitive dissonance: a disconnec-tion between the increasing sophistication of the design (and the swelling cost) of these studies and the apparent lack of care ...