Race Reporting in Dermabrasion Clinical Trials: A Systematic Review

The authors sought to determine the frequency and methods of race reporting in dermabrasion clinical trials.

A PubMed search for terms: "dermabrasion," "derm-abrasion," and "derm abrasion" was conducted, yielding 1,786 papers. The "Clinical Trial" and "Randomized Control Trial" filters were applied. Non-English manuscripts were excluded. Remaining manuscripts were manually screened. Forty-one papers met final inclusion criteria.

Forty-six percent (n=19) of studies included mention of race, skin color, or Fitzpatrick skin type (FST). Four studies reported FST of 78 dermabrasion participants. Of these, 19 percent had FST I, 27 percent had FST II, 32 percent had FST III, 17 percent had FST IV, and 1 percent had FST V. Three patients (4%) were lost to follow-up and did not have FSTs reported. Twenty-two percent (n=9) of the studies including 513 patients reported race or skin color. The races of 107 (21%) could be definitively extracted. Of these 107 patients, 94 percent were White, five percent were Black, and one percent were Asian.

Our search was limited to PubMed-indexed articles which were categorized as 1) clinical trials or 2) randomized control trials. Articles that were incorrectly indexed in accordance with the search tool may have been inadvertently excluded.

Our analysis suggests that the collection and reporting of racial demographic information has been rare in dermabrasion clinical trials. The absence of this demographic information limits the generalizability of the results. Given the health disparities that arise due to racism, investigators should collect and report participant races to improve risk stratification and transparency.