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Adequate information about clinical trial results must be given to participants

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The lay summary of trial results to be provided to participants should be written in plain language, use infographics and be concise — something that currently is almost never achieved.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank four British patient advocates, E. Banks, D. Keatley, M. Mackenzie and A. Roberts, for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Epidemiology Unit, Health Research Institute-Fundación Jiménez Díaz University Hospital, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Rafael Dal-Ré

  2. Division of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine, NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

    Arthur L. Caplan

  3. Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, Department of Law, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Søren Holm

  4. Centre for Medical Ethics, HELSAM, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Søren Holm

  5. Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Reecha Sofat

  6. BHF Data Science Centre, Health Data Research, London, UK

    Reecha Sofat

  7. National Cancer Research Institute Advocates Forum, Stevenage, UK

    Richard Stephens

Authors
  1. Rafael Dal-Ré
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  2. Arthur L. Caplan
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  3. Søren Holm
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  4. Reecha Sofat
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  5. Richard Stephens
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rafael Dal-Ré.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Dal-Ré, R., Caplan, A.L., Holm, S. et al. Adequate information about clinical trial results must be given to participants. Nat Med (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-02948-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-02948-1

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