Relation between randomized controlled trials published in leading general medical journals and the global burden of disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: More than two-thirds of the world's population live in low-income countries, where health priorities are different from those of people living in more affluent parts of the world. We evaluated the relation between the global burden of disease and conditions or diseases studied in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in general medical journals. METHODS: A MEDLINE search identified 373 RCTs that had been published in 6 international peer-reviewed general medical journals in 1999. Manual review excluded non-RCTs, brief reports and trials in which the unit of randomization was not the patient; 286 RCTs remained eligible for analysis. We identified the RCTs that studied any of the 40 leading causes of the global burden of disease. Five of these conditions were considered unsuitable for study with an RCT design and were excluded from subsequent analysis. To provide a practical perspective, we asked 12 experts working with international health organizations to rate the relevance to global health of the articles that studied any of the top 10 causes of the global burden of disease, as measured by disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and mortality, using a 5-point Likert scale. RESULTS: Among the 286 RCTs in our sample, 124 (43.4%) addressed 1 of the 35 leading causes of the global burden of disease. Of these, ischemic heart disease, HIV/AIDS and cerebrovascular disease were the most commonly studied conditions. Ninety articles (31.5%) studied 1 of the top 10 causes of the global burden of disease. The mean rating (and standard deviation) for international health relevance assigned by experts was 2.6 (1.5) out of 5. Only 14 (16%) of the 90 trials received a rating of 4 or greater, indicating high relevance to international health. Almost half of the 40 leading causes of the global burden of disease were not studied by any trial. INTERPRETATION: Many conditions or diseases common internationally are underrepresented in RCTs published in leading general medical journals. Trials published in these journals that studied one of these high-priority conditions were generally rated as being of little relevance to international health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.519 | 0.855 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.024 | 0.034 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".