Research Isn’t All We Know: Some Drug Trials Are Never Published.
Clinical trials are the foundation for doctors’ understanding of whether a drug is safe and effective. But the published trials are not all: those that do not favor the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies can often go unnoticed.
Former FDA medical officer Eric Turner found that drug claims included studies with both positive and negative conclusions about their drug. For example, among antidepressants, the ratio was about 50/50. But published studies – those that you, me, or your doctor could find by searching PubMed or Google Scholar – gave 94% positive results. Published studies are more likely to be positive when funded by pharmaceutical companies. “When the news is good, pharmaceutical companies will make sure the world knows about it and publish the data,” Turner told Salonou.
This is all old news, but a new analysis of anxiety drugs shows that bias still exists, even though drug trials are now supposed to be published on Clinicaltrials.gov . Only 13% of registered trials provided their results within a year of the completion of the trials.
The result of this bias is that the drug’s reputation for effectiveness may be exaggerated. Turner tells Salon that this could affect the doctors’ work:
Before joining the FDA in 1998, Turner treated patients as a private psychiatrist and “naively believed all the literature I read. I assumed the drugs worked, and when they didn’t work, there was something out of the ordinary in the patient. ” When he started working for a pharmaceutical agency, he saw a lot of negative research that the public had never seen, and realized that his assumptions were wrong.
As a patient, you probably cannot know if unpublished studies explain the problems you have with the drug, so consider it just a PSA of what goes on behind the scenes. You can keep up with the efforts to uncover more research on alltrials.net and read the full article on Salon for more information.
Pharmaceutical Companies Don’t Tell You The Truth | Salon
Photo by epsos.de .
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