UCSF Study: Drug Companies Distorting Trial Information

A recent article from January 2009 DRUG TOPICS magazine, the news magazine for pharmacists, featured a story about a team of medical investigators from University of California in San Francisco.  The article accuses drug companies of distorting drug trial results, which the medical profession rely on when prescribing medications.

The investigators determined that these biased trials may result in misinformation which could lead to unwanted side effects, and unnecessary use of certain drugs, etc. They looked at 164 drug trials conducted over a 2 year period that were published in medical journals, as well as some not published yet, and found many discrepancies that tended to lead to more favorable presentations. The conclusions were that the scientific information that professionals rely upon is incomplete and potentially biased. The results of this study were published in the current issue of PLoS Medicine, an online medical journal.