Analysis of the reporting characteristics of gingival recession treatment trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.

Gingival recessions are a common disease and one of the most frequently used method for managing them is the tunnel technique (TUN). Although more and more articles are addressing the problem, few are adequately structured, usually without following the standard protocols. Many checklists have been developed for this purpose. Among them, the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) checklist is commonly used. Therefore, the present review analyzed trials based on it. The completeness of registration of the trial protocol data was assessed using the TIDieR checklist with regard to the coronally advanced tunnel technique (CAT) with subepithelial connective tissue graft (sCTG) (CAT + sCTG) and CAT alone. The review also investigated the consistency of the research description in the published articles.A total of 37 records were gained from ClinicalTrials.gov and the corresponding publications, including 32 studies employing CAT + sCTG and 5 studies using only CAT. The description of intervention in ClinicalTrials.gov was inadequate for all analyzed trials, and there were also differences between the registered and published studies. The present analysis showed that the description of the registered trials is often incomplete and that detailed data is not pro-vided. It is essential that clinical research is well documented and properly described, so that the findings can be easily implemented in daily clinical practice without confusion.