The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7421 p417
7 October 2006

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Industry-sponsored reviews should be read with caution

Industry-sponsored reviews draw more favourable conclusions than Cochrane reviews of the same drug and so readers should be wary of their conclusions, a study published online on 6 October concludes (BMJ Online First).

“Industry-supported reviews of drugs are less transparent than Cochrane reviews and have few reservations about methodological limitations of the included trials; their conclusions should be read with caution,” the authors say. “Details of concealment of allocation, blinding, inclusion and exclusion criteria for trials, search strategies, and estimated effects in each included trial need to be reported to allow readers to judge the reliability of reviews,” they add.

The researchers looked at 24 Cochrane studies which could be matched with other meta-analyses, eight of which were industry-sponsored. Seven of these had conclusions that recommended the experimental drug without reservation, compared with none of the Cochrane reviews of the same drugs.