Distribution of randomized controlled trials in anaesthesia in India: Contribution from neuroanaesthesiologists

Sir,

Randomized controlled trial (RCT) is one of the most simplest, useful and powerful tool in the field of modern clinical research.[1] It is defined as a study in which individuals are randomly allocated into different groups to receive the various clinical interventions.[2] Common intervention is the comparison of two or sometimes more than two groups with control. The control may be placebo, no intervention or standard practise we follow commonly. The main advantage of proper randomization is to avoid any allocation or selection bias that can occur because of various known or unknown prognostic factors like age, gender and drugs, etc.[3] [4] Large number of research articles are being published worldwide in various journals in various languages. Many of these journals are indexed with PubMed, a popular database of scientific literature. We aimed to find out the contribution of articles related to anaesthesia published from India. We searched PubMed, using the terms ‘anaesthesia’, ‘anaesthesia’ and ‘India’ after applying search filters such as humans and RCTs. Results were retrieved for a period from 1987 to 2014. A total of 488 articles were displayed. We categorised these articles into following subtypes: (1) Airway related (2) analgesia related (3) intravenous/inhalational (4) premedication (5) regional block (6) sedation (7) peripheral nerve block 8) other drugs 9) others or miscellaneous. The results are shown graphically [Figure 1].

Figure 1: Contribution of various articles in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) from India

We found that over a period of 28 years, articles related to analgesia were published more often than others. We also observed that articles related to neuroanaesthesia formed only 6% of total. Possible reason could be the late emergence of neuroanaesthesia as a separate super-specialty. Also the neurosurgical procedures were performed very less. It cannot be over emphasized that research is needed in the field of neuroanaesthesia in particular from the Indian researchers. Hence, more clinical researches are required to be performed to increase the percentage of contribution from neuroanaesthesia.

No conflict of interest has been declared by the author(s).

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