International Acupuncture Clinical Trials Registry

Aims: to investigate the status quo of worldwide clinical trial registers, to find out the quantity and quality of acupuncture clinical trial registry in all major registers, and give suggestions to the clinical trial registration of acupuncture trials.Methods:1. Status quo investigationGather information of the major global clinical trial registers by visiting their websites to investigate their status quo of development and acupuncture trial registration.2. Comparison studyCompare the quantity and quality of acupuncture clinical trials registered in major global clinical trial registers to investigate the differences of trial registers.Results:1. WHO ICTRP clinical trial registration networkWorld Health Organization (WHO) established International Clinical Trial Registration Plate (ICTRP) to promote the registration of clinical trials in order to open clinical trial information to the public. 5 primary registers and some partner registers were set to provide data to ICTRP.1.1 Status quo of foreign clinical trial registersAs an independent clinical trial register, Clinicaltrials.gov, supported by the National Institute of Health of the United States, its clinical trial registration data is accepted to the ICTRP. Clinicaltrials.gov has the largest amount (54099 on March, 2008) of registered trials and from more than 154 countries. The ISRCTN (International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number) of UK occupied the second place with 6659 registered trials. Other registers only share small amount of registered trials, which mainly came from their native countries.1.2 Status quo of Chinese clinical trial registerChinese Clinical Trial Register (ChiCTR) is the only clinical trial register in China. Its was founded in 2005, and accepted as a primary register of ICTRP in 2007. 77 Chinese clinical trials registered in ChiCTR until March, 2008.2. Acupuncture clinical trial registrations2.1 Foreign acupuncture clinical trial registration Clinicaltrials.gov has got 157 acupuncture trials registered, ISRCTN has 65 acupuncture trials, and Australian New Zealand Clinical Trial Register (ANZCTR) has 13 acupuncture trials. Although accepted to be one of the primary registers, Clinical Trials Registry– India (CTRI) has no acupuncture registry. Only very few acupuncture trials from Korea and Japan were registered outside Korea and Japan. No registered acupuncture trial was found in Korea and Japan.2.2 Chinese acupuncture clinical trial registrationUp to March, 2008, Only 5 acupuncture trials registered in the ChiCTR, 2 of them were registered in 2007. None of the trials were published on WHO ICTRP. All 5 trials were conducted in China.Conclusions:1. Worldwide clinical trial registry system is developing fast, Acupuncture clinical trial registry is bound to be required2. Developing status quo of clinical trial registry is much better in foreign countries than in China both for search portal and registration system. Different registers have different items and styles.3. Almost all the acupuncture clinical trials were registered in registers outside China. Acupuncture trial registration is not widely known in China, and ChiCTR didn't pay enough attention on this area, either.4. Disease patterns of registered acupuncture clinical trials were limited, over 50% were focused on pain relieving.5. Promotion of registration of acupuncture clinical trials could help to improve the design quality of acupuncture clinical trial, and help to produce better evidence of the effectiveness of acupuncture.