Bias Uncovered in Medical Journals
Reported November 25, 2008
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — To learn about new drugs, health care providers usually turn to reports in medical journals — but new research that uncovers bias in those reports should encourage them to think twice about what theyre reading.
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco have found medical journal reporting of trials for new drugs to be skewed. They reviewed the publication status of 164 trials related to 33 new drug applications (NDA) approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2001. The researchers found unexplained differences between the FDA submissions and their corresponding publications. Those differences tended to paint the drugs in a more positive light in medical journals than in FDA submissions.
Trials with favorable outcomes were more likely to be published than those without unfavorable outcomes, and only half of trials that showed no benefit for the test drug were published. Nine conclusions differed between the NDAs and the papers published in medical journals. Those differences favored the test drugs in journals.
An NDA details a new drugs development from laboratory and animal studies through to clinical trials on humans. FDA reviewers use this information to decide whether or not to approve the drug.
SOURCE: PLoS Medicine, 2008;