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CAPTURE! SHOCK! EXCITE! Clinical Trial Acronyms and the “Branding” of Clinical Research
- Michael Berkwits, MD
- Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center; University of Pennsylvania Health System (Berkwits)
The use of acronyms to name study groups and trials is by now an unremarkable aspect of clinical research. A recent review identified more than 2000 named trials as of 1998 (1), and journals and conferences regularly announce the results of new efforts with names like those in the title of this article (2-4). That the phenomenon has received little formal attention is surprising because no other scientific community presents its work in this way. Naming is generally an act of tremendous symbolic and practical significance, and there is no reason to think it any less so in medical science. The growth of trial names in recent years reflects important professional and proprietary trends in medicine that deserve our attention. Citing selected cardiovascular trials published or referenced in leading English-language journals, I provide a brief history of the practice, a review of its theoretical effects, and a functional taxonomy based on those effects.
Contexts
The use of trial acronyms loosely tracks important stages in the evolution of modern clinical research. Abbreviated names were absent from the literature when multiple factors inhibited cooperative research; they emerged in the 1970s as early indicators of successful collaboration between researchers and centers. The first effort explicitly named by abbreviation by principal investigators in a research report was the University Group Diabetes Program, or UGDP, investigation (5). This study, which tested the effect of insulin and oral hypoglycemic agents on cardiovascular events in diabetic patients, had funding from the National Institutes of Health, was carried out at multiple centers using a large sample (12 clinics and 1027 patients), and yielded unexpected results. The apparent finding that tolbutamide increased cardiovascular deaths provoked multiple editorials and analyses, each of which referred to the trial by name. The “UGDP” designation was, of course, incidental to the …
This 100-word excerpt has been provided in the absence of an abstract.
