SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Pharmaceuticals: Absence of Evidence

from the Economist

... A study published in PLoS Medicine, an online journal, confirms what many have suspected and what previous studies have hinted at: drug companies try to spin the results of clinical trials. If this were done merely in marketing materials, it might be tolerable.

What Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues found, however, was troubling evidence of suppression and manipulation of data in studies published in (or often withheld from) peer-reviewed medical journals.

To see if firms massaged data from trials of new drugs, Dr Bero and her team compared the information that companies share with America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about those drugs with what they eventually publish in medical journals.