Overview of clinical trials on deprescribing: A comprehensive analysis of the ClinicalTrials.gov database

Understanding the current features of deprescribing clinical trials is crucial for improving trial designs and identifying research gaps.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of deprescribing trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.

We searched the ClinicalTrials.gov database for deprescribing clinical trials and evaluated the characteristics of these relevant studies. For the primary completed trials, we also searched PubMed and Google Scholar to confirm their publication statuses.

We identified 125 deprescribing trials for analysis. Only 39.2% were completed, 88.0% were interventional trials, 56.0% enrolled only the elderly, 70.4% were single-center clinical trials, and 35.2% were sited in the United States. The number of interventional trials registered before patient recruitment from 2021 to 2025 was higher than that from 2012 to 2020 (P < 0.05). Compared with unpublished clinical trials, published ones had larger sample sizes, more parallel intervention models, and more registered after recruitment (all P < 0.05). The cumulative publication rate within 5 years after the completion of primary trials was 60.7%. The journal with the highest impact factor (IF) for publication was JAMA Internal Medicine (Q1, IF 23.3), and the one with the largest number of publications was BMC Geriatrics (Q2, IF 3.8).

Our study showed that deprescribing trials were mostly large-scale and single-center studies, mainly carried out in developed countries, and most of them were incomplete, lacking results and publications. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out such trials in developing countries, and to pay more attention to improving their completion rates, as well as promoting the publication and dissemination of their results.