This will come as a shock, I’m sure, but the sponsor of the medical study seems to have an influence on how the study turns out.
Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. recently funded five studies that compared its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa with Risperdal, a competing drug made by Janssen. All five showed Zyprexa was superior in treating schizophrenia.
But when Janssen sponsored its own studies comparing the two drugs, Risperdal came out ahead in two out of three.
In fact, when psychiatrist John Davis analyzed every publicly available trial funded by the pharmaceutical industry pitting six new antipsychotic drugs against one another, nine in 10 showed that the best drug was the one made by the company funding the study.
“On the basis of these contrasting findings in head-to-head trials, it appears that whichever company sponsors the trial produces the better antipsychotic drug,” Davis and other experts wrote in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
[…] By contrast, when the federal government recently compared a broader range of drugs in typical schizophrenia patients in a lengthy trial, the two medications that stood out were cheaper drugs not under patent. The medication that worked best for patients with severe, intractable schizophrenia was clozapine, whose sales lag well behind every other drug in its class. And an earlier leg of the study found that the largely dismissed drug perphenazine had about the same risks and benefits as far more expensive competitors that are widely assumed to be safer.
I’m … stunned …
… it took so long for someone to point this out.