On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognised the right of all children to "the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health", the editor of the Lancet Richard Horton was delivering a plenary address at the first summit of StaR Child Health in Amsterdam in 2009. In his address, he stated the:

“Lack of research, poor research, and poorly reported research are violations of children’s human rights.”

Individuals from various disciplines, including the World Health Organisation, the US Food and Drug Administration, and the European Medicines Agency, gathered together to discuss a topic of shared interest: the paucity and shortcomings of paediatric clinical trials.

The quality, quantity and relevance of data involving children are substantially lower than those involving adults. This problem persists despite knowledge that inadequate testing of medication in children may result in harmful or ineffective drugs being offered or beneficial drugs being withheld.

Indeed a systematic review sponsored by the World Health Organisation found that there were few guidelines relevant to the design, conduct and reporting of research in children. Most guidelines only seem to focus on what should be done, failing to address the important issue of how it should be completed.

The mission of StaR Child Health is to improve the design, conduct and reporting of research with children through the development and dissemination of evidence-based standards.

How best to achieve this monumental task? The StaR Child Health group is using a "knowledge to action" process that involves using a systematic process to review the current knowledge base, identify gaps, develop guidance and implementation strategies. An ambitious agenda that is gaining tremendous momentum.

Based the results of a systematic review and survey of key stakeholders, they have identified 10 priority issues. Each issue will be systematically addressed by a standard development group that will produce evidence summaries, identify gaps and develop a dissemination strategy. The priority issues include recruitment and informed consent, risk of bias, sample size, age-specific dosage and administration, safety and global health.

But more guidelines and standards will not change the conduct of trials unless they are implemented. StaR Child Health is leading in knowledge translation by involving multiple stakeholders from the beginning and is working with international partners, such as the GRIP Project, a global research network in paediatrics.

For the quality of health care for children across the world to improve, trials must be conducted that address the complexity of child health and provide reliable evidence-based answers. Now we can be confident that we have a bright StaR illuminating the path forward.

I deliberately resisted blogging about it for a whole month, partly because I wanted to see the build-up and the aftermath of it, and partly because I wanted to see what everybody else said about it. I am, of course, talking about the UN High Level Meeting for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) on 19th and 20th September. The only other occasion that the UN has met like this on a health issue is for HIV/AIDS. The stakes were and are undoubtedly high and momentum has gathered and continues to gather. Yet there is definitely a sense of anti-climax after the summit. The organisation and run-up to the meeting seems to have been dogged by logistical but more importantly, by blocks through governments and multinational companies concerned about hard outcomes from the meeting.

I followed ex-BMJ editor, Richard Smith’s blog keenly throughout the meeting. It does not seem like the key stakeholders were invited or asked for opinions in time. As he said, probably the best thing to come out of the meeting and the pre-meeting is the NCD Alliance, a robust organisation of all the important stakeholders joined for the common purpose of raising awareness.

There is no question that awareness has been raised, and the summit was covered by medical journals, including the Lancet and the BMJ. Interestingly, the major American journals were notable by their silence on the first NCD summit of its kind. Yet, these same journals are the first to publish trials of expensive therapies for cardiovascular diseases, often with major conflicts of interest. On the subject of conflicts of interest, there are particular concerns about NCDs and the way big company interests are still able to play a major role in the UN.

The newspapers and other press gave coverage, but not as much as one would hope. Some of the loudest calls for actions came from celebrities such as Jamie Oliver. Looking around the WHO website, I did not find much in the way of concrete outcomes.

During my clinical cardiology practice, I have asked doctors and patients in the last few months if they knew that the meeting was happening. Almost without exception the answer was “no”.

On the second day of the summit, Richard Smith depressingly concluded:
“The big failures for me have been the failure to raise understanding of NCDs among the wider population and—as discussed at this morning’s meeting—the failure to recognise the need for a system that has at its centre patients not professionals.” It does not come much more damning than that.

What is the point of global health and health policy if it is not engaging at all with end-users? At the BMA Global Health event last week, I could not help feeling that this is an issue across global health and health policy-makers. Words are important but so are actions, particularly if the global fight against NCDs is to succeed.

At the European Cardiology Congress in Paris this week, the news is that cardiovascular medicine is still producing tonnes of new research and there are therapeutic advances in all areas from atrial fibrillation and stroke to heart failure and heart attacks. For example, there are 3 new oral anticoagulants (blood-thinning drugs) which offer true alternatives to warfarin for the first time in 50 years. All these drugs have shown superiority in recent trials presented at this meeting- rivaroxaban in ROCKET-AF, apixaban in ARISTOTLE and dabigatran in the RE-LY trial.

Salim Yusuf, arguably one of the most prolific clinical triallists and lead investigator in two of those trials, also presented the results of a different type of study, published in the Lancet this week. The PURE study included over 150000 patients with known coronary heart disease from 17 countries and showed that even in high-income countries. The drug treatments that such patients should be taking are well-established and available very cheaply-aspirin, beta-blockers, ACE-inhibitors and statins. Depressingly, the proportion of patients globally taking these drugs is less than 50% even in rich countries. In Africa, 80% of eligible patients were taking no drugs at all. As Salim Yusuf said, treatment gaps like this in the HIV/AIDS epidemic led to human rights arguments for broadening of antiretroviral treatment and mobilisation of the global health community and governments.

The inequality was also visible at concurrent “Meet the Triallists” sessions. Delegates clamoured to get to the trial update for the ARISTOTLE trial of the novel anticoagulant, apixaban, but I was one of only 20-30 people who heard Salim Yusuf talk about the PURE trial. Global health cardiology is just not sexy enough yet, even in the wake of the UN high-level meeting in September.

You could argue what is the point of all these fancy new drugs if we are failing to get simple, cheap, proven therapies to the people who need them most, even in rich countries. The tsunami of cardiovascular disease hitting all countries is not going to be touched by all the new drugs currently being trialled. We have to get better at translation. More research funders and senior researchers need to lead new trials with global health impact if we are to have any chance of focusing on problems worth researching.