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Ethnic variations in the prevalence, severity, and management of asthma have been reported1,2 but, apart from these recent reports, our understanding of the relationship between ethnicity and asthma is limited. This is a concern as ethnicity may be an important confounder in asthma studies through such varied influences as differences in lung function, socioeconomic disparities, and concordance with treatments.3 Proactive ethnic trial recruitment policies exist in the US but there is no comparable legislation in Europe. We sought to investigate the hypothesis that asthma trials conducted in the US are more likely than European studies to report on the ethnicity of subjects.
Our sampling frame was the Cochrane Airways Group Trials Register which contains records of published and unpublished clinical trials. We manually searched this database for English language reports of randomised controlled trials of asthma reported during the period 2000–2. …