ctrdata-registers {ctrdata}

ctrdata: information on clinical trial registers

Description

Registers of clinical trials from which protocol- and result-related information can be retrieved and analysed with package ctrdata, last updated 2024-07-18.

1 - Overview

• EUCTR: The EU Clinical Trials Register contains close to 44,000 clinical trials (at least one investigational medicinal product, IMP; in the European Union and beyond; no new trials, but results for contained trials continue to be added)

• CTIS: The EU Clinical Trials Information System started in January 2023 for new clinical trials. It includes more than 4,700 publicly accessible trials. How to automatically get the CTIS search query URL: here

• CTGOV2: ClinicalTrials.gov includes close to 500,000 interventional and observational studies

• ISRCTN: The ISRCTN Registry includes more than 25,000 interventional and observational health studies

2 - Notable changes

CTGOV was retired on 2024-06-25; ctrdata subsequently translates CTGOV queries to CTGOV2 queries. The new website (CTGOV2) can be used with ctrdata since 2023-08-27. CTIS was relaunched on 2024-06-17, changing the data structure and search syntax, to which ctrdata was updated. CTIS can be used with ctrdata since 2023-03-25. More information on changes: here

3 - References

Material	EUCTR	CTGOV2	ISRCTN	CTIS
Home page	link	link	link	link
About	link	link	link	link
Terms and conditions, disclaimer	link	link	link	link
How to search	link	link	link	link
Search interface	link	link	link	link
Glossary	link	link	link
FAQ, caveats, issues	link	link	link	link
Expert / advanced search	link	link	link	link
Definitions	link	link	link	link
Example*	link	link	link	link

4 - Example explanation and ctrdata motivation

*The example is an expert search for interventional trials primarily with neonates, investigating infectious conditions. It shows that searches in registers may not be sufficient to identify the sought trials:

• The CTGOV2 search retrieves trials conducted exclusively with neonates.

• EUCTR retrieves trials with neonates, but not only those exclusively in neonates.

• ISRCTN retrieves studies with interventions other than medicines.

• CTIS retrieves trials that mention the words neonates and infection.

To address this, trials can be retrieved with ctrLoadQueryIntoDb into a database collection and in a second step can be selected, based on values of relevant fields of all retrieved trial information, for example:

• EUCTR field f115_children_211years for age criteria

• ISRCTN field interventions.intervention.interventionType for type of study

• CTIS fields ageGroup and authorizedApplication.authorizedPartI.medicalConditions.medicalCondition

ctrdata helps identifying fields with function dbGetFieldsIntoDf.

Author(s)

Ralf Herold [e-mail]