Print“Not one of the meta-analyses mentioned whether researchers who conducted the trials were employed by industry or personally received money from industry.”
Financial conflicts of interest are increasingly being obscured in drug research as the use of large meta-analyses—so called “studies of studies”—are being used to drive policy and prescription decisions, an international team of investigators warn.
The problem, say the researchers in the March 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is that in combining the statistical results of multiple drug trials, declarations of financial conflicts of interest made in individual drug trials disappear when they are combined with other trial results.
The researchers reviewed 29 recent meta-analyses on a range of drug treatments published in high-impact medical journals. Those 29 studies of previous studies included results from 509 drug trials. The researchers documented funding sources and author-industry financial ties of all 509 trials and whether or not the meta-analyses noted who had funded the trials. They found that only two of the 29 meta-analyses acknowledged who funded the original drug trials and even in the two cases that noted the funding sources they did so in “very obscure places in the published articles.”
The researchers also identified seven meta-analyses where every single drug trial included was paid for, at least in part, by the maker of the drug or had investigators linked financially to drug makers. In six of the seven meta-analyses, however, there was no mention of who funded the drug trials.
“Not one of the meta-analyses mentioned whether researchers who conducted the trials were employed by industry or personally received money from industry,” says Brett Thombs, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, who led the study.
The authors have called for changes in policy regarding how evidence on drug treatments is reported in meta-analyses. “Unless we require authors of meta-analyses to provide this information for consumers, it will be lost,” says Thombs. “Patients and doctors want to have this information, and we believe it is in the best interest of all of us to make sure it is available.”
March 11, 2011
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-obscuring_financial_ties.html
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