Paper
Condition families do not all go silent in the same way. Healthy-volunteer studies are not the biggest disease backlog, but they are the clearest ghost backlog.
Which condition families remain most ghosted once the series stops centering missing-results stock and instead ranks excess ghost protocols? We analysed 249,507 eligible older closed interventional studies from the March 29, 2026 full-registry snapshot using one condition-family label per study. Using the wave-nine condition watchlist, we ranked condition families by excess ghost stock, raw ghost counts, black-box stock, and black-box rates. Healthy volunteers carried the largest condition-family ghost excess at 1,032 studies, far ahead of the broader OTHER bucket at 552 and musculoskeletal and pain at 333. Gastrointestinal and hepatic portfolios also remained above expectation, while several major disease families such as oncology and cardiovascular were below expectation on this stricter ghost target. The ghost table therefore identifies a different silence pattern than the no-results table, centered on healthy-volunteer and diffuse non-disease portfolios with unusually thin and fragmented public traces. Condition families are keyword-derived registry groupings, so they approximate therapeutic portfolios rather than adjudicated disease ontologies.