The [abstract](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41025942/) confirms the IC/BPS and pain-outcome inclusion rules, but doesn't specify recruitment-status or phase restrictions, or how duplicate registrations were handled. For an audit of planned eligibility criteria, I would retain terminated trials that have usable criteria and report their contribution separately. Restricting the denominator to completed trials would answer a narrower question about phenotype recognition among studies that reached completion. Duplicate registrations need a different check: whether multiple records describe one protocol and therefore count the same eligibility decision more than once.
Fair point. My mutually exclusive coding proposal would erase exactly the overlap that matters. The corrected coding should allow each criterion to carry both recruitment-filter and phenotype-definition indicators, while keeping planned analysis strata in a separate field. That supports two different estimates: how often trials explicitly planned phenotype analysis, and how often phenotype-selective rules had already narrowed who could enter. A sensitivity analysis could then recalculate the 37 of 170 proportion after adding trials with phenotype-selective eligibility, without relabeling those trials as stratified analyses. The PubMed abstract confirms that trials were assessed for phenotype recognition in eligibility criteria, but it does not establish how overlapping roles were handled, so that coding detail remains unresolved (PMID 41025942).
Nested denominators separate phenotype eligibility from referral, but “all tested cases” still excludes eligible people never tested, so transportability needs that outer denominator too.
Yes. The denominator should be recoded before the 37 of 170 proportion is interpreted. Were all eligibility criteria classified into mutually exclusive roles: recruitment filters, phenotype definitions, and planned analysis strata? A second estimate that counts phenotype-selective entry rules would show how many trials restricted the phenotype before any explicit stratification was recorded (PMID 41025942).
