Australian researchers have put a spotlight on poor disclosure practices at major international conferences, finding conflicts of interest are shown too briefly for any meaningful interpretation and industry involvement is often not discussed.

IBD fellows Drs Ethan Tan and Calvin Xu from Northern Health in Melbourne reviewed 206 oral presentations at the Congress of the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation (ECCO) held in Berlin, Germany, earlier this year.

Findings presented at the United European Gastroenterology (UEG) Week 2025 meeting showed almost one fifth of presentations had conflict of interest statements missing (18%) and of those with disclosures displayed, many had inconsistencies with their corresponding abstract (22%).

When displayed, the median number of conflicts for each presentation was 10 (range 5-29) with a median slide duration of just 2.3 seconds (range 1.5-3.4) – which was too short to allow meaningful live comprehension, the researchers said.

There was no correlation between slide duration and the number of conflicts.

While 59% of presentations contained at least one conflict of interest with relevance to the presentation topic, only 6% of those disclosures were assessed as “adequately discussed” with a median slide duration of 6.5 seconds.

Adequate discussion involved specifying how a relevant conflict of interest related to the presentation topic and mentioning whether there was company involvement in protocol design, data analysis, or slide preparation.

The most common comments were non-contributory and generic such as “here are my disclosures” and in nearly a third of cases, there was no verbal comment.

The findings were also published in a letter to the editor for the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis [link here], with the researchers concluding that disclosure practices at ECCO were suboptimal and inconsistent with the guidelines provided on the congress website.

Dr Robert Little.

Speaking to the limbic, senior author Dr Robert Little, a gastroenterologist at Northern Health, said disclosures at gastroenterology conferences had not been previously evaluated despite the enormous capacity for presentations to influence clinical practice and prescribing patterns.

He said ECCO provided the perfect opportunity to do this because of its size and impact, access to on-demand online recordings and the rate of industry-led drug development in IBD.

“I think it [the study] highlights that current practice is not doing what it’s supposed to do — helping audiences understand potential sources of bias,” Dr Little said.

“We know that conflicts of interest influence study design, prescribing patterns, and guideline development and if we’re not upfront about industry relationships then it also threatens public trust in both researchers and clinicians.”

He said the results were broadly consistent with the limited literature from other specialties and suspected similar patterns across gastroenterology subspecialties, which his team would investigate next.

“More rigorous and standardised guidelines would be a great start [to making an improvement]. We know that the time pressures of conference presentations are challenging but we demonstrated that presentations deemed as having adequate disclosures only required an additional 4 seconds of slide display compared to those with inadequate disclosures,” Dr Little said.

“Initiatives such as a template slide, minimum slide duration, highlighting disclosures relevant to the presentation, and a statement indicating industry involvement in protocol design, data analysis, and slide preparation would be relatively easy to implement.”

ECCO told the limbic it was “fully aware” that conflict of interest issues were a recurring topic at various conferences, including its own congress.

“We appreciate the authors’ suggestions for improvement; these can be used as a benchmark for ensuring personal accountability as well as proper separation of science from industry influence in our ongoing efforts to safeguard scientific integrity,” the organisation said.

ECCO is producing a reply letter to be published in the same journal.