Background: Elderly patients represent the greatest consumers of healthcare per capita but have historically been underrepresented in clinical trials. It is unknown how many trials are designed to focus exclusively on elderly patients.
Objective: To define the prevalence of interventional trials that study exclusively elderly persons and describe the characteristics of these trials, including their distribution across conditions most prevalent in the elderly.
Design: All interventional clinical trials enrolling exclusively elderly patients (≥65 years), conducted primarily in high-income countries, and initiated between 2006 and 2014, identified through ClincialTrials.gov.
Main measures: Trials were identified and characterized according to design features and disease categories studied. Across disease categories we examined the burden of disease in the elderly in high-income countries (measured in disability-adjusted life years [DALYs]) and compared to the number of trials conducted exclusively in the elderly.
Results: Among 80,965 interventional trials, 1,112 (1.4%) focused on elderly patients. Diverse types of interventions were studied in these trials (medications 33%, behavioral interventions 18%, and dietary supplements 10%) and the majority was funded by non-profit organizations (81%). Studies tended to be small (median sample size 122 participants [IQR 58, 305]), single-center studies (67%). Only 43% of 126 disease categories affecting elderly persons were studied in trials focused on the elderly. Among these disease categories, there was a 5162-fold range in the ratio of DALYs per trial. Across 5 conditions where over 80% of DALYs are in the elderly, there were a total of only 117 trials done exclusively in the elderly.
Conclusions: Very few and mostly small studies are conducted exclusively in elderly persons, even for conditions that affect almost exclusively the elderly.