Psychiatric drugs fare favorably when companies pay for studies

You may have missed this last week, as I did, that yet another study confirms the bias in clinical drug trials as favoring the company who pays for the study.

Drug companies fund a growing number of the studies in leading psychiatric journals, and drugs fare much better in these company-funded studies than in trials done independently or by competitors, researchers reported Wednesday.

About 57% of published studies were paid for by drug companies in 2002, compared with 25% in 1992, says psychiatrist Igor Galynker of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City.

His team looked at clinical research in four influential journals: American Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.

The best part, however, is later in the article when a spokesperson for the industry trade group tries to defend these findings:

Because drug studies are very expensive, pharmaceutical companies fund those most likely to have a positive outcome, Goldhammer says. The firms weed out drugs that don’t work and consult with the Food and Drug Administration to design trials that will pass muster with the FDA. “We’re constantly trying to develop new drugs to treat mental illness,” he says.

What he says is true, insofar as much as it goes. But in a careful review of clinical drug trials, all sponsors of a drug trial should show very similar outcomes, since the cost of funding a clinical trial is similar no matter who is paying for it. For instance, why should your drug fare worse — significantly and statistically — when a competitor is paying for it than when the maker of the drug is paying for it? There’s no attempt to defend that finding, because that data tells the story — drug makers design studies to showcase their drugs while showing their competitors in a worse light.

Finally, another golden insight…

Posting a negative study on the database is voluntary. “And common sense dictates that the worse the drug does, the less likely you are to volunteer to beat yourself up publicly by sharing that,” says Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen, the Washington-based consumer advocacy group.

Really now? Most researchers I know feel just the opposite — that there’s a dearth of data when it comes to negative results. And there’s a simple, obvious solution — pseudonymize the submissions. The maintainer of the database knows who the submitters are, but no one else does. That way there’s no public reputation harm that could come to a researcher.

And, by the way, researchers don’t take it personally when a drug trial fails to show the results the maker wants it to show. That is the nature and heart of science — for every positive result, there’s about a dozen or more negative results. This is the world researchers live in and they don’t mind sharing it with the rest of us.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 29 May 2006
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.