Industry sponsorship may lead to clinical trial bias

A review has identified industry sponsorship as an important source of bias in clinical trial reports.

The outcomes of clinical trials may be reported differently depending on whether or not the trials were sponsored by industry, researchers have warned.

Experts at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, reviewed 48 previous studies on drugs and medical devices being prescribed for a range of diseases and conditions.

Overall, they observed that industry-sponsored studies tended to report greater benefits and fewer harmful side-effects, compared with those lacking industry funding.

In addition, the conclusions of industry-sponsored trials tended to be more favourable, while their results and conclusion sections were less likely to agree with each other.

The findings suggest that industry-sponsored drug and medical device studies "are more often favourable to the sponsor's products than non-industry-sponsored studies", according to lead researcher Andreas Lundh, from the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen.

"These findings resonate with current calls for better access to information about how trials are carried out, and raw data," he added.

Senior author Lisa Bero, from the University of California, San Francisco, added that if industry sponsorship is a source of bias, "then we need to think about developing better methods for reporting, assessing and handling industry bias in systematic reviews that evaluate the effects of drugs and devices".