Methodological and ethical aspects of randomized controlled clinical trials in minors with malignant diseases

Due to the new European regulations for pediatric medications, future clinical trials will include an increasing number of minors. It is therefore important to reconsider and evaluate recent methodological and ethical aspects of clinical trials in minors.

The following questions were investigated: How are randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) performed in practice? Do investigators take into consideration biomedical ethical principles, explicated for example by Beauchamp and Childress, when planning and conducting a trial? The study was conducted in a descriptive manner. A systematic, algorithm-guided search focusing on RCTs in minors with malignant diseases was carried out in PubMed. One-thousand-nine-hundred-sixty-two publications from 2001 to 2005 were randomized in sequence. The first 1,000 publications were screened according to a priori defined inclusion criteria. One hundred seventy-five publications met the criteria and were reviewed using the SIGN methodological checklist (2004), the CONSORT Statement (2001, section Methods, items 3-12) and indicators for ethical aspects. Seventeen publications were checked by two raters.

Information on randomization and blinding was often equivocal. The publications were mainly rated positive for the criteria of the SIGN checklist, and mostly rated negative for the additional items of the CONSORT Statement. Regarding the ethical principles, only few contributions were found in the publications. Inter-rater reliability was good.

In the publications analyzed, we found only limited information concerning methods and reflections on ethical principles of the trials. Improvements are thus necessary and possible. We suggest how such trials and their respective publications can be optimized for these aspects.