Exclusion of elderly people from clinical research: a descriptive study of published reports

Conclusions reached in studies of young people cannot be extrapolated to elderly people.1 It is thus essential that elderly people are included in clinical studies. We set out to discover whether and to what extent studies published in medical journals exclude this section of the population. We examined all the original research papers in all the issues of the BMJ, Gut , the Lancet , and Thorax between 1 June 1996 and 1 June 1997. We excluded case studies and meta-analyses. We looked for a mention of age limit first in the abstract or the methods section of the papers, but we sometimes found it mentioned …