Conflict Of Interest? Few Meta-Analyses Identify Who Funded Drug Trials
Thursday, March 10, 2011 - 17:40
in Psychology & Sociology
More and more, policy decisions and what medications doctors prescribe for their patients are being driven by large 'studies of studies' called meta-analyses, which statistically combine results from many individual drug trials. There's a problem, though. A group analyzing meta-analyses writes in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that important declarations of financial conflicts-of-interest in individual drug trials disappeared when those studies were combined in meta-analyses. In other words, the information was right there, it wasn't hidden in the studies themselves. read more