Paper Information

Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) serve diverse populations and may enhance participant diversity in clinical trials; however, their engagement in trials remains understudied. The objective of the current study was to examine participant diversity in hypertension (HTN) and type-2 diabetes (T2D) clinical trials.

Of 4552 articles identified, 26 clinical trials were included. The pooled proportion was 0.35 (95% CI: 0.26, 0.45) for Hispanic, 0.36 (95% CI: 0.23, 0.48) for Black/African American, 0.03 (95% CI: 0.02, 0.05) for Asian, 0.58 (95% CI: 0.54, 0.63) for female, and 0.25 (95% CI: 0.07, 0.43) for uninsured participants, and 0.54 (95% CI: 0.36, 0.72) for people with limited education (≤high school).

Trials involving FQHCs demonstrated high inclusion of historically underrepresented than typical trial populations. This underscores the potential of FQHCs to improve clinical trial representativeness and to enhance the generalizability of research findings.

We searched PubMed, Cochrane, CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature), Web of Science, Embase, and Scopus for clinical trials of medical interventions addressing HTN or T2D among adults (≥18), engaging one or multiple FQHCs, and published between 2013 and 2023. We reported pooled proportions of representation of underserved populations in clinical trials.