Serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials

Reporting adverse events (AEs) and serious AEs (SAEs) are practical steps to ensure safety for volunteers and patients in medical research involving medications, treatments and devices. However, the burden and cost of reporting should be proportionate with the public health benefit of this informati...

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Main Authors: Wallace, S., Myles, P., Zeps, Nikolajs, Zalcberg, J.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Australasian Medical Publishing 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/20848
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author Wallace, S.
Myles, P.
Zeps, Nikolajs
Zalcberg, J.
author_facet Wallace, S.
Myles, P.
Zeps, Nikolajs
Zalcberg, J.
author_sort Wallace, S.
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Reporting adverse events (AEs) and serious AEs (SAEs) are practical steps to ensure safety for volunteers and patients in medical research involving medications, treatments and devices. However, the burden and cost of reporting should be proportionate with the public health benefit of this information. • Unfortunately, in Australia there is clear evidence of ever-increasing requirements from sponsors and ethics committees to report AEs and SAEs unnecessarily, leading to a decrease in the uptake of research, particularly less well funded investigatorinitiated trials. • We believe that individual AE reports to ethics committees serve no useful purpose, because in most cases the study group identity (drug exposure) is not known in studies with blinded treatment arms and their value is limited. • Pragmatic, investigator-initiated Phase IV clinical trials of post-marketed drugs or devices are needed to understand their role in everyday clinical practice. In this setting, the workload and costs of systematic, complete reporting of all AEs and SAEs (independent of whether these are treatment-related) is wasteful, and mostly unnecessary.A trial data safety and monitoring committee is in the unique position of being able to review safety information according to the blinded treatment arms of the study. This enables safety data to be analysed appropriately and a summary report provided to the trial steering committee, principal investigators and the relevant ethics committees in a meaningful way. Defined trial endpoints do not need to be reported as safety events (because they are being properly monitored and analysed).
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-208482017-09-13T13:51:04Z Serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials Wallace, S. Myles, P. Zeps, Nikolajs Zalcberg, J. Reporting adverse events (AEs) and serious AEs (SAEs) are practical steps to ensure safety for volunteers and patients in medical research involving medications, treatments and devices. However, the burden and cost of reporting should be proportionate with the public health benefit of this information. • Unfortunately, in Australia there is clear evidence of ever-increasing requirements from sponsors and ethics committees to report AEs and SAEs unnecessarily, leading to a decrease in the uptake of research, particularly less well funded investigatorinitiated trials. • We believe that individual AE reports to ethics committees serve no useful purpose, because in most cases the study group identity (drug exposure) is not known in studies with blinded treatment arms and their value is limited. • Pragmatic, investigator-initiated Phase IV clinical trials of post-marketed drugs or devices are needed to understand their role in everyday clinical practice. In this setting, the workload and costs of systematic, complete reporting of all AEs and SAEs (independent of whether these are treatment-related) is wasteful, and mostly unnecessary.A trial data safety and monitoring committee is in the unique position of being able to review safety information according to the blinded treatment arms of the study. This enables safety data to be analysed appropriately and a summary report provided to the trial steering committee, principal investigators and the relevant ethics committees in a meaningful way. Defined trial endpoints do not need to be reported as safety events (because they are being properly monitored and analysed). 2016 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/20848 10.5694/mja15.01007 Australasian Medical Publishing restricted
spellingShingle Wallace, S.
Myles, P.
Zeps, Nikolajs
Zalcberg, J.
Serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials
title Serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials
title_full Serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials
title_fullStr Serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials
title_full_unstemmed Serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials
title_short Serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials
title_sort serious adverse event reporting in investigator-initiated clinical trials
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/20848