Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14111

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Tobin A-M.
Drug firms release early findings, study shows
The Canadian Press 2008 Aug 8
http://www.thestar.com/article/474191

Full text:

No mention of caveats or limitations of data

Researchers who scrutinized news releases put out by top-selling pharmaceutical companies say they’ve found some shortcomings.

Dr. Chaim Bell, the senior author of the study, says he began the project after noticing press releases and news articles that dealt with “really preliminary information” but didn’t itemize caveats or limitations of the studies.

The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science One, was conducted by Bell and other researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto.

“The classic is that there’s always some new cure for cancer that comes out,” explains Bell, a clinician-scientist and assistant professor of medicine and health policy, management and evaluation.

“And unfortunately people become disappointed when it doesn’t come to fruition, but part of that is because it was preliminary findings, and then when there are more mature findings, or when it’s analyzed a different way, with … a larger sample size, it really didn’t come out to those same findings.”

They decided to look at the electronic news releases issued in a one-year period by the 10 top-selling pharmaceutical companies, but had to exclude one company’s releases because they weren’t publicly available for the chosen year, 2005.

Altogether, they counted 1,028 press releases that were issued.

Of these, 235 concerned an announcement about original research.

When these were studied, it was found that more than half were concerning preliminary research of the sort that might be presented at a conference.

“I was surprised that of the scientific communications that companies give out, about 60 per cent of them are based on findings from abstracts,” Bell says, referring to preliminary data presented at scientific conferences.

“So the majority of the findings of the press releases are related to preliminary findings that aren’t fully peer-reviewed.”

In addition, about 30 per cent did not quantify the study results, Bell says. For example, a news release might say one drug was better than another rather than saying there was a 30 per cent decreased risk related to using one drug over another.

On the plus side, 20 per cent of the news releases described studies published in peer-reviewed journals.

And Bell found it “encouraging” that the majority of news releases – 76 per cent – talked about adverse effects of the drugs.