What is it about?
Improving pre-eclampsia research: urgent action is required. Pre-eclampsia is a pregnancy-related condition leading to raised blood pressure and changes in the kidneys and other organs. If left untreated, it can lead to life-threatening complications, for pregnant women and their babies. New treatments are urgently needed. Research studies testing potential treatments for pre-eclampsia often measure different outcomes. For example, when a new blood pressure medicine is being tested, one researcher may decide to measure the fall in blood pressure (an outcome) and another researcher may only measure medicine side effects (a different outcome). Researchers at the University of Oxford reviewed previous research studies testing potential treatments for pre-eclampsia to determine which outcomes were reported. What did they find? * Widespread variation outcome reporting. * Information about important outcomes, including death, stroke, and quality of life, was often missing. * Few research studies followed up the babies for long enough to understand the long-term effects of treatment. * There was poor reporting of outcomes related to the harms of the treatments being tested.
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Why is it important?
Research studies testing new pre-eclampsia treatments are expensive and difficult to conduct it is imperative they are designed to provide the right answers. Researchers testing new pre-eclampsia treatments are often collecting information about outcomes that are not very important to patients and those treating them. With so much variation in the outcomes reported, when complete the results from different studies cannot be easily compared or combined, to see which treatments work best. These are barriers to improving the care women and their children receive. A potential solution is for all future pre-eclampsia research to consistently collect and report the most important mother and baby outcomes.
Perspectives
Research studies testing potential new treatments for pre-eclampsia are missing important outcomes and neglected to evaluate their benefits and safety over the long term. Over the past three decades, the outlook of pre-eclampsia research has widened, with long-term follow-up of mothers and babies becoming increasingly prioritised by patients, healthcare professionals, and researchers. An inability to compare, contrast, and combine individual research studies limits the usefulness of research to inform clinical practice. Developing and implementing a clinically relevant minimum data set, in future pre-eclampsia trials could help to address these issues.
Dr James M N Duffy
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Outcome reporting across randomised controlled trials evaluating therapeutic interventions for pre-eclampsia, BJOG An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, June 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/1471-0528.14702.
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