Doctors Found to be Relying On “Skewed” Information—What’s a Lipitor-Taker to Believe?
Pill-takers, beware. A new study from UCSF found that doctors frequently rely on “skewed” information when they’re learning about new drugs or drug trials—reports in medical journals that are biased both of terms of what they don’t choose to publish (unfavorable results) and what they do publish (some rather selective data that may differ from what was reported to the FDA).
In theory, doctors have access to the same complex information that the FDA gets about drug trials. In practice, they usually get information about new drugs and drug trials from medical journals.
Many such reports are quietly sponsored by drug companies and may be “skewed” to show their drugs in a favorable light. They might be written by a company medical writer or physician that has been involved in developing the drug, or by a ghostwriter attributing the article to a physician.
UCSF’s team of medical investigators, led by Lisa A. Bero, examined 164 drug trials that took place over two years. They then looked at write-ups of the trials in medical journals and found that trials with favorable outcomes were about five times more likely to be published than those with unfavorable outcomes. Worse, there were sometimes discrepancies between the results the FDA received and the facts submitted to the medical journals. Approximately one-fourth of the results of trials testing the effectiveness of new drugs still had not been published five years after approval by the FDA.
What that boils down to is that your doctor may very well not be getting complete, unbiased and accurate information before he prescribes all those little pills in your medicine cabinet.
And at a time when doctors are increasingly prescribing drugs Lipitor and other statins for ever-larger groups of people, cheered on by trials like the JUPITER trial that are sponsored by drug companies, it could be very important for them—and you—to understand that.
Read about the full results of the UCSF study in the online medical journal of the Public Library of Science, PloS Medicine.
30. December 2008 at 10:01 am :
I’ve been on simvastatin for 3 or 4 months and have experienced growing problems with diplopia over that time. (I had some minor problems with it before going on the drug.) I am relieved to have discovered a possible explanation for my problem and will talk with my family doctor and opthalmologist about this possibility. Thank you for this posting!