Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6359

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Publication type: Journal Article

Big pharma calling journals' shots?
New Scientist magazine 2006 Oct 15;

Abstract:

Money talks, and the drug industry’s dollar talks loud and clear through the
pages of leading medical journals. That’s the conclusion of Peter Gøtzsche
and his team at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, who
compared reviews of drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies with
similar reviews done without industry support.

The Danish team was looking for bias in meta-analyses, which combine results
from multiple drug studies to establish the effectiveness of an experimental
drug compared with an established treatment. To ensure a fair comparison,
they matched studies that were published within two years of one another and
that addressed the same drugs and diseases. “That has not been done before,”
Gøtzsche says.

Studies conducted without drug industry funding reached similar conclusions
to the systematic reviews held in the Cochrane online database, recognised
as the gold standard for such analyses. Studies backed by drug companies,
however, tended to recommend the experimental drug without reservation, even
though the estimated effect of the treatment was similar, on average, to
that reported in the Cochrane reviews (BMJ, DOI:
10.1136/bmj.38973.444699.0B).

Gøtzsche says that some industry-funded reviews were also biased in their
methods, as they considered only studies held in the company’s own database.
He says he would now ignore any meta-analyses funded by drug companies.