The CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) statement offers a standard way for authors to prepare reports of trial findings, thereby facilitating their complete and transparent reporting and aiding their critical appraisal and interpretation. The CONSORT statement has led to improved reporting and better implementation of trials. Yet, specific elements for trials with children (from newborn babies to adolescents, detailing the intervention, drug dose and delivery, validity of the outcomes studied, etc.) are not included. Paediatric trials require additional and modified items.
In collaboration with members of the CONSORT Group, we are extending the current CONSORT statement to develop a checklist of essential items that authors should include when reporting the main results of paediatric clinical trials. The CONSORT-Children extension to the CONSORT statement aims to improve quality of information reported from paediatric trials by providing evidence-based recommendations on the core content that should be addressed in scientific literature. CONSORT-Children will highlight the key elements in the reporting of paediatric trials that differ from adult trials by systematically evaluating current evidence from published guidelines and implementing expert, consumer, and knowledge user feedback to produce a checklist and supplementary explanation document to guide paediatric trial reports.
Current status
The checklists will be updated once CONSORT-Children 2024 becomes available. We are currently in the protocol writing stage and assembling an international advisory group. The CONSORT-Children 2024 Statement and Explanation and Elaboration document will be published in Q1 2024. More information can be found here.
Details from the systematic review can be found here:
Updated May 2023
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