Hard to believe, isn’t it?

About 84 percent of company-supported studies published in 10 major medical journals in 2003 reported positive results about breast cancer meds that were investigated. But studies that weren’t funded by industry showed favorable results just 54 percent of the time.

Why the discrepancy? Well, drugmakers may be less inclined to publish when studies are negative. Or it could be that pharmaceutical companies are “flat out better” at identifying meds most likely to perform well in clinical trials, says Jeff Peppercorn, a cancer doc at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine, as well as a Merck consultant and member of Genentech’s speaker bureua. He and colleagues published the analysis in Cancer, the medical journal of the American Cancer Society.

“Just because the results are positive, I don’t think we can assume that the results are biased,” he tells The Raleigh News & Observer. But, he adds, “the pharmaceutical industry is not only a major player, it is the major player. We need to pay attention to this because we need to know if important questions are not being asked.”

There are other possibilities, of course. Perhaps drugmakers aren’t rushing to compare their meds with rivals. That could change the ratio. But since drugmakers fund up to 70 percent of all clinical trials in the US, according to a Harvard School of Public Health report two years ago, that may not be on the horizon.

[tags]Clinical Trials, Industry Funding, Journal Studies[/tags]