Commercial bias in medical research: Statins - Findings Depend On Who Has Funded The Research

Commercial bias in medical research

There are several different statin drugs that are used to lower cholesterol. But the question is: which cholesterol-lowering statin is best? And the answer is: Your guess is as good as mine, as study findings depend on who has funded the research.

Research on the effectiveness of a major class of drug — statins, used to reduce cholesterol — has come under the spotlight. There are several statins now on the market and many research trials have compared different brands of statin drugs one with another.

The authors of this article looked at nearly 200 such trials. Some of them were funded by governments, some by pharmaceutical companies, and in some cases the source of the funding wasn't clear. What was very clear, however, was that trials of statin comparisons were more likely to report results and conclusions favouring the product made by the sponsor pof the trial rather than the drug with which it was compared. In simila trials which were not sponsored by drug companies, the opposite conclusopn was aften reached.

Lisa Bero and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco argue that their findings show that the type of sponsorship available for randomized controlled trials of statins was strongly linked to the results and conclusions of those studies, even when other factors were taken into account. However, it is not clear from this study why sponsorship has such a strong link to the overall findings. There are many possible reasons why this might be. It has been suggested that drug companies may deliberately choose lower dosages for the comparison drug when they carry out head-to-head trials. Others have suggested that trials which produce unfavourable results are not published, or that unfavourable outcomes are suppressed. Whatever the reasons, the conclusions of this article are important, and suggest that the evidence base relating to statins may be substantially biased. There may also be implications for research involving other types of drug.

Reference

Bero L, Oostvogel F, Bacchetti P, Lee K. Factors associated with findings of published trials of drug-to-drug comparisons: Why some statins appear more efficacious than others PLoS Med 2007 4(6): e184.

Full free text at http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040184

Last updated 6 June 2007