NEJM editor: trial design should influence practice, not funding

New England Journal of Medicine Editor Jeffrey Drazen said study design and not industry sponsorship should be the basis for evaluating the reliability of medical studies. His comments came in an editorial accompanying a study from researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and colleagues evaluating the effect of clinical trial funding disclosures on physicians' interpretation of trial results. The researchers found that physicians were half as willing to prescribe hypothetical drugs when told the drugs were evaluated in industry-funded trials as they were drugs they were told were evaluated in NIH-funded trials, even when the trials had the same methodological rigor.

Drazen questioned whether physicians' lack of trust in industry-funded studies is justified. He said physicians often mistrust industry-funded research because the pharmaceutical industry has a financial stake in the trial outcome, but he noted that "investigators in NIH-sponsored studies also have substantial incentives, including academic promotion and recognition, to try to ensure that their studies change practice." Drazen added that "decisions about how trials influence practice should be based on the quality of the information conveyed in the full study report." ...