What would your reaction be if the results of a football match were reported as 5:0 by one of the teams and as 3:1 by the other team? Exactly this is the result of one (1) of 57 studies that Schott et al. analyzed for their systematic review (2) on the following pages, when they evaluated the question of
possible associations between the financial funding of drug trials and their results:
pharmaceuticals manufacturer Lilly compared its substance olanzapine with risperidone in five studies (reported result: 5:0 for olanzapine); competitor company Janssen compared its own product risperidone with olanzapine in 4 studies and reported a score of 3:1 for risperidone.
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Manipulation techniques
There is no secret to how the desired results are fabricated. It is possible to give a study a spin into the desired direction at any stage of the research process.
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Transparency is the way forward as far as counteracting the manipulation of studies is concerned. From a scientific point of view, study protocols should be made available to a wide specialist audience even before patients are recruited, in order to be able to identify weaknesses before it is too late. For Cochrane Reviews, this has long been common practice and has proved successful. The raw data should not be kept as a trade secret either. The collection and evaluation of the data should be open to scrutiny, and the same goes for their interpretation. Study registries constitute an important step towards progress, especially in counteracting publication bias. The data required by the World Health Organization and other organizations for registries of clinical studies (10) are, however, not sufficient to guarantee the necessary transparency.
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If we are serious about our patients’ welfare, things cannot be allowed to remain as they are.
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