Lisa Bero
Drug trials that are published in peer-reviewed journals are more likely to reflect favorably on the efficacy of the drug than the reports submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for New Drug Approval, while less positive results go unpublished, according to Lisa Bero, PhD, who led the research.
Findings were published in the November 24, 2008, online issue of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine.
Among those trials that were published, discrepancies also were common between the data and the written conclusions, predominantly favoring the drug from the company that funded the research. The result is skewed information for both prescribing physicians and researchers conducting a meta-analysis of the drugs in question, said Bero, who is a UCSF professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.
