MONEY talks, and the drug industry鈥檚 dollar talks loud and clear through the pages of leading medical journals. That鈥檚 the conclusion of Peter G酶tzsche 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. 鈥淭hat has not been done before,鈥� G酶tzsche 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).
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鈥淐ompany-backed studies tended to recommend the experimental drug鈥�
G酶tzsche says that some industry-funded reviews were also biased in their methods, as they considered only studies held in the company鈥檚 own database. He says he would now ignore any meta-analyses funded by drug companies.
