Age-related medical conditions are increasingly becoming a research priority given
the relevant burden for healthcare systems and the projected demographic changes occurring
in our societies. Accordingly, several randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have being
conducted in order to identify pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions
aimed at tackling their clinical manifestations and/or positively affecting their
natural history. Besides testing the efficacy of interventions, RCTs should also provide
a minimal core of key information allowing the results translation into the routine
clinical practice. In other words, readers should be allowed to understand the potential
generalizability of the findings to different settings and individuals (i.e., external
validity) [
[1]
]. Such necessity is often particularly under pursued when older people are recruited,
being challenging to properly capture and describe the main characteristics of such
population (e.g., frailty, comorbidities, polypharmacy) [
[2]
]. This has likely contributed to a repeatedly documented lack of fit between elderly
participants in clinical trials and healthcare users [
[3]
].Keywords
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References
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: July 23, 2016
Accepted:
July 13,
2016
Received in revised form:
July 12,
2016
Received:
July 9,
2016
Identification
Copyright
© 2016 European Federation of Internal Medicine. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
