Lay titles for clinical trials: A balancing act.

With increasing transparency demands and the new legal requirements for providing clinical trial information to lay readers, clinical trials need to be given titles that patients can understand and recognise. Trial titles inform the readers what the trial is about, what substances are studied, and who the target population is. Devising a lay title is challenging as it needs to be understandable to lay readers, fully identify the trial, meet registry requirements, and also be translatable into different languages. Lay titles also need to fit different types of documents, e.g. trial protocols, trial advertisements, informed consent forms, and lay summaries. As the lay title is one of the first pieces of information that is displayed, good lay titles help patients searching clinical trial registries for trial participation. For sponsors, informative and understandable lay titles increase the chances of attracting the target patient populations for clinical trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]