The exclusion of disabled people from health research, could be making it less representative of the population

A review has looked at thousands of clinical trials, finding about 35-percent excluded disabled people without an ethical or scientific reason.

Otago University disability expert Rachelle Martin says disabled people make up a sixth of our population.

She says if they're left out of trials, the findings of those trials are no longer relevant when applied to health settings.

Martin says the findings don't represent the real world, if they don't include the real world.