An alarming number of clinical trial studies in medical research journals may be fake or flawed, according to anaesthetist John Carlisle. After scrutinizing over 500 trials, Carlisle found that 44% contained flawed data, and 26% of them were so unreliable they couldn’t be trusted. These “zombie” trials are a dangerous threat as they can be included in meta-analyses and systematic reviews, leading physicians to make treatment decisions based on misleading information. Some researchers estimate that up to a third of trials on any given topic could be fabricated. Efforts are being made to develop trustworthiness screening protocols for RCTs to prevent such trials from being published.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230718112821/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w