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A Survey on Methodological Issues of Clinical Research Studies Reviewed by Independent Ethic Committees during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy

The struggle for information and the hasty search for answers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the possibility of lowering study quality, as well as ethical committees’ review standards during the outbreak. Our investigation aimed to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the quality of clinical...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Milanese, Alberto, Trerotoli, Paolo, Vestri, Annarita
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9517254/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36141946
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191811673
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author Milanese, Alberto
Trerotoli, Paolo
Vestri, Annarita
author_facet Milanese, Alberto
Trerotoli, Paolo
Vestri, Annarita
author_sort Milanese, Alberto
collection PubMed
description The struggle for information and the hasty search for answers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the possibility of lowering study quality, as well as ethical committees’ review standards during the outbreak. Our investigation aimed to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the quality of clinical research studies submitted to Italian Ethics Committees in the period between April and July 2020. All 91 Italian ethics committees were contacted via email in order to collect anonymized information on the type and quality of COVID-19-related studies submitted to each committee during the study period. The present study summarizes the characteristics of the 184 study applications collected, pointing out, especially, how the quality of the study population and statistical analysis are crucial variables in determining the study approval. Nevertheless, despite the need for high-quality and open scientific information, especially exacerbated by this particular historical period, only a minority of the ethics committees (20.9%) agreed to share their data; such scarce participation, beyond biasing the representativeness of the results obtained by the present study, more importantly, hinders the broader goal of creating trust between researchers and the general public.
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spelling pubmed-95172542022-09-29 A Survey on Methodological Issues of Clinical Research Studies Reviewed by Independent Ethic Committees during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy Milanese, Alberto Trerotoli, Paolo Vestri, Annarita Int J Environ Res Public Health Article The struggle for information and the hasty search for answers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the possibility of lowering study quality, as well as ethical committees’ review standards during the outbreak. Our investigation aimed to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the quality of clinical research studies submitted to Italian Ethics Committees in the period between April and July 2020. All 91 Italian ethics committees were contacted via email in order to collect anonymized information on the type and quality of COVID-19-related studies submitted to each committee during the study period. The present study summarizes the characteristics of the 184 study applications collected, pointing out, especially, how the quality of the study population and statistical analysis are crucial variables in determining the study approval. Nevertheless, despite the need for high-quality and open scientific information, especially exacerbated by this particular historical period, only a minority of the ethics committees (20.9%) agreed to share their data; such scarce participation, beyond biasing the representativeness of the results obtained by the present study, more importantly, hinders the broader goal of creating trust between researchers and the general public. MDPI 2022-09-16 /pmc/articles/PMC9517254/ /pubmed/36141946 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191811673 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Milanese, Alberto
Trerotoli, Paolo
Vestri, Annarita
A Survey on Methodological Issues of Clinical Research Studies Reviewed by Independent Ethic Committees during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy
title A Survey on Methodological Issues of Clinical Research Studies Reviewed by Independent Ethic Committees during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy
title_full A Survey on Methodological Issues of Clinical Research Studies Reviewed by Independent Ethic Committees during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy
title_fullStr A Survey on Methodological Issues of Clinical Research Studies Reviewed by Independent Ethic Committees during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy
title_full_unstemmed A Survey on Methodological Issues of Clinical Research Studies Reviewed by Independent Ethic Committees during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy
title_short A Survey on Methodological Issues of Clinical Research Studies Reviewed by Independent Ethic Committees during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy
title_sort survey on methodological issues of clinical research studies reviewed by independent ethic committees during the covid-19 pandemic in italy
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9517254/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36141946
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191811673
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