Interpretation
The number of unused trials (32%) compares unfavourably to the audit of
the fertility trials over the same time period where only 14% of all
trials in the specialised register being classified as unused(17). The Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections Group
(CARIG) paper (7) that found 41% of the RCTs in their
specialised register were unused, although this difference could be
attributed to the longer time-period of this audit, as the CARIG group
incorporated 5285 trials from 1930 to 2014.
Trials using plant and herbal remedies for menopausal symptoms were the
most commonly unused trials, this does not reflect the increasing
consumer interest in complementary medicine(18). The
wastage of these unused trials is an important ethical consideration for
the women enrolled in these trials. In the future we need to ensure that
their sacrifice is not wasted, and they would be willing to participate
in future trials (11, 15).
One of the top ten questions for endometriosis in the priority setting
partnerships(8-10): “what are the outcomes and/or
success rates for surgical or medical treatments which aim to cure or
treat endometriosis rather than manage it?”, fits broadly into our
identified SR topic for endometriosis ‘Surgical techniques for
laparoscopic resection of endometrioma’.
In accordance with the recommendations of priority setting
exercises(8), the next step for prioritisation of
topics in this project is to develop a short survey to be disseminated
to healthcare consumers (via task exchange) and to the CGF editors for
prioritisation of the new review topics.