Drug studies sponsored by drug manufacturers tend to report higher drug efficacy than studies not sponsored by the drug company, a new report published in the Journal of Political Economy on Oct. 7 finds.
The report found a “sponsorship effect” that tends to bias sponsored studies toward reporting higher drug efficacies. The author could not find differences in study design between those funded by drug companies and those not.
“Removing the sponsorship effect would reduce the difference in efficacy … by about 50%,” Tamar Oostrom, an assistant professor of economics at Ohio State University, said in her paper.
“This effect was larger than I expected,” Oostrom told The Epoch Times over email. “My results suggest that sponsored arms of trials should be discounted substantially.”…