Peptide basics

Nearly half of registry hits are not studies of the compound you searched

This page explains how the trial counts on this site are produced and why they are smaller than the ones you get from searching a registry yourself. It contains no dose, schedule or route, and makes no claim about whether any compound works.

What a registry search actually matches

ClinicalTrials.gov indexes free text. When you search an intervention name, it returns studies whose records contain something resembling that string — in the intervention field, the title, the summary, the arm descriptions or the outcome measures. It is a text search wearing the costume of a database query.¹

That is the correct design for a registry. It is the wrong tool for counting evidence, because three very different situations produce the same hit: a trial that gave people the compound, a trial that measured it in blood, and a trial that named it once while studying something else.¹

The arithmetic across 68 compounds

We ran the search for every compound tracked here and then opened each result to check whether the compound was actually administered. The raw searches returned 6,004 studies. After verification, 3,186 remained. The difference is 2,818 studies, or 46.9% of everything the registry handed back.¹

• Raw matches returned by the registry: 6,004.
• Verified as administering the compound: 3,186.
• Rejected on inspection: 2,818 (46.9%).
• Compounds where the raw count was at least double the verified count: several, including MGF and gonadorelin.¹²⁴

Three ways a hit turns out to be nothing

The first is a name collision. MGF is an abbreviation used for mechano-growth factor, but the same three letters appear across oncology records for unrelated reasons. The raw search returns 102 studies and the verified count is zero: not one of them administered MGF to anybody.²

The second is measurement rather than administration. Gonadorelin is used diagnostically and appears in records as something measured or triggered rather than tested. Its raw search caps out at 1,000 matches; 14 survive verification.⁴

The third is a passing mention. A trial of something else may list a compound in an exclusion criterion or a background paragraph. The registry indexes the word; the study has nothing to say about the compound.¹

Why this matters when you read a claim

A seller quoting a study count has almost always quoted the raw number, because the raw number is what the search box shows and it is larger. If someone tells you a compound has dozens of human studies, the useful question is not whether the registry says so. It is which registration numbers they mean.¹

Ask for the NCT identifiers. A compound with real evidence has them, and they take under a minute each to check. A compound whose count came from a search box will not produce them, because there is nothing to produce.¹

MGF is the clearest case on this site: 102 raw registry matches, zero verified human studies. The number a search box gives you and the number of trials that exist are not the same thing.

Common questions