Eligibility criteria of randomized controlled trials published in high-impact general medical journals: a systematic sampling review.

By H. V. Van Spall, Andrew Toren, Alex Kiss, R. Fowler. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 2007

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A literature review on the representativeness of randomized controlled trial samples and implications for the external validity of trial results (2015, methodology): “In agreement with the present review, it was reported that the elderly, women, and patients with co-morbidities were frequently ineligible for trial inclusion [2].”
The rising tide of polypharmacy and drug-drug interactions: population database analysis 1995–2010 (2015, background): “This partly reflects that evidence of benefit is often derived from trials that usually exclude older adults and people with multimorbidity and do not quantify harms well [12-15], and partly that guidelines often recommend chronic treatments with benefits that are only evident over long periods with”
Critical care and the global burden of critical illness in adults (2010, background): “65 The evidence base for critical care therapeutics, derived from few positive randomised trials, thus might not be generalisable to many patients cared for in ICUs.”