I don’t know if I’m the only one who gets depressed by these sorts of articles. You have the progression through medical school and residency, you finally start feeling up-to-date on current treatment, your Grand Rounds invited speakers present results from some trials, and you think you’re fully armed to provide the best care modern medicine can provide.
And, then you discover that it’s all a stack of cards predicated on results influenced by pharmaceutical funding.
This article is from JAMA, again, very important topic given studies performed with pharmaceutical funding have a fourfold greater chance of reporting positive results. They looked at meta-analysis, one of the techniques we try to use to increase statistical power in our reading of the literature. They discovered that nearly no meta-analyses included comment on whether the included studies were funded by pharmaceutical literature – even though 60% of the studies reported funding sources, and 70% of those studies reported receiving funding from the pharmaceutical industry – and the same sort of dismal reporting for author conflicts of interest. What it means – it’s another cautionary tale regarding how pervasive the masking of conflicts of interest really is, and how easily it creeps into the medical literature without our knowledge.