Short communicationPharmaceutical company funding and its consequences: A qualitative systematic review☆
Section snippets
Background, and two earlier reviews
Interactions between the pharmaceutical industry and academic medical researchers, which have raised questions for almost a century, are more important now than ever. This article reviews the effects of funding on the published results of clinical trials, finding that pharmaceutical company funding is strongly associated with results that favor those companies' interests. This is important, as the industry funds approximately 70% of all clinical trials [1], and biases created by funding sources
Research between 2003 and 2006: Positive results
At a clinically-oriented professional meeting, Finucane and Boult found that of sponsored trials, 100% presented positive results, whereas of other trials, only 67% presented positive results [6]. Interestingly, of their 30 industry-supported trials only 3 acknowledged that support; others had authors who were pharmaceutical company employees, or received indirect funding from those companies—thus, without strict reporting requirements funding's effects are unseen. With different goals, Fries
Research between 2003 and 2006: Negative results
Barden et al. found no significant association in the articles comparing pain relievers in head-to-head comparisons: Drugs owned by the sponsoring companies do not fare better in the data from these trials [27]. There are important differences between this analysis and most of the others. First, Barden et al. did not compare articles but rather reported data, and to the extent that industry sponsorship affects interpretation and rhetoric, looking at the data alone would not have revealed any
Conclusion and discussion
Given their widely varying methodologies, a meta-analysis of the above results would be misleading. However, by way of summary, 17 analyses published since 2003 have shown an association, typically a strong one, between industry support and published pro-industry results, and 2 have not. Taken in conjunction with the earlier systematic reviews that found 20 of 23 reports of positive associations, it is unequivocally the case that sponsorship influences published results.
Do we need more research
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This study was supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.