Reuters, et al. - Drug studies not showing funding ties, report says; perception of bias

Doctors may be making decisions based on incomplete information published in some of the most prestigious medical journals because conflicts of interest between researchers and drug companies are not being fully disclosed, a new Canadian study has found.

A team from Montreal's Jewish General Hospital and McGill University found that important declarations of financial ties between researchers and pharmaceutical manufacturers often disappeared when data from individual drug trials were combined into a single study.

"Patients want their doctors to make their drug choices or treatment decisions based on unbiased evidence," said Michelle Roseman, the lead author on the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "But we found that a lot of these studies that combine results from a number of different drug trials might have findings that are biased due to drug company sponsorship."

Led by Roseman, a McGill graduate student and Brett Thombs, a psychologist and psychiatry professor at McGill, the team of researchers reviewed 29 recent meta-analyses on a range of drug treatments published in several prominent medical journals, including the JAMA, Lancet and the British Medical Journal.