Methodological Quality of Experimental Stroke Studies Published in the Stroke Journal: Time Trends and Effect of the Basic Science Checklist.

Abstract

The translational roadblock, characterized by beneficial effects of treatments in experimental studies and subsequent neutral or negative results in clinical trials, is a major problem in cerebrovascular medicine.1 Growing evidence suggests that this may be due, at least in part, to low study quality of experiments resulting in a systematically reduced internal validity of animal studies. The lack of blinding and randomization in experimental studies, for instance, leads to an overestimation of treatment effects and may, therefore, contribute to different results of preclinical and clinical studies.2 As a consequence, the Stroke Therapy Academic Industry Roundtable was founded to develop recommendations on quality characteristics of animal stroke studies.3 Stroke is generally regarded as one of the most important journals in the area of cerebrovascular disease, publishing clinical and experimental studies with the latter focusing on basic mechanisms of cerebral ischemia and on the development of new stroke therapies. To insure the quality of experimental studies, authors need to declare in a checklist cornerstones of study conductance, such as randomization and blinding procedures, definition of inclusion and exclusion criteria, etc, when submitting an article to Stroke . However, whether implementation of the so-called Basic Science Checklist in the submission process in August 2011 improved the quality of preclinical studies is unknown so far. The aim of this study was to analyze time trends of quality and design of preclinical studies published in Stroke from January 2010 through December 2013 and whether implementation of the Basic Science Checklist in August 2011 had an effect on key quality measures. ### Retrieving Publications and Selection of Studies We used the journal’s Archive of All Online Issues4 for the identification of eligible articles published from January 2010 to December 2013. Publications were categorized according to the journal’s article categories as an …