Have you ever wondered how reliable the results of clinical trials are?

We have! So much that we decided to investigate it! We are very happy to announce that another systematic review is about to commence within the EST-project. Within this review, we will investigate the implementation quality of previous clinical trials of interventions aimed to reduce stuttering among children and adolescents.

Individuals who persist with stuttering have a heightened risk of developing comorbidities such as social anxiety, depression and negative attitudes to communication (Guttormsen, Yaruss & Næss, 2018; Iverach, O’Brian, Jones, Block, Lincoln & Harrison, 2009). It is therefore essential that people who stutter have access to the best available interventions during childhood to minimize the likelihood of them developing persistent stuttering. In order to evaluate these interventions objectively and thoroughly, it is crucial that the outcomes reported in clinical trials are based on high quality implementation procedures. Our review will investigate the elements of implementation quality that have been reported in previous clinical trials and examine whether these elements have been considered when calculating effect sizes or interpreting the results. Similar reviews have been conducted in other research fields (see TIDieR, Hoffman et al., 2014 for an example) and in some instances checklists have been developed to guide future research. It is therefore an aim of our systematic review to develop a checklist for researchers to use when designing future clinical trials of stuttering interventions.

We have pre-registered our review at Prospero (see here). Pre-registration is an increasingly common step in open research practices. It aims to minimise duplication of systematic reviews and reduce publication bias by allowing people to compare completed systematic reviews with the original protocol planned (i.e., research questions, selection criteria and search terms). If you want to learn more about pre-registration, take a look at Gonzales and Cunningham’s article from 2015 or alternatively visit the Prospero home page

From the EST-project team!