Posted by pharmrep on September 23, 2002, at 1:17:01
In reply to Re: dont start » pharmrep, posted by Alan on September 22, 2002, at 22:50:41
> There should be a law requiring that as one requirement for getting a drug approved, all data on formal and informal trials in humans must be placed into the public domain.
>
> For a long time (and still to some extent), the makers of recent antidepressants have been able to hide the known adverse effects and the fact that the the drugs have performed no better (and often worse) than placebo in a majority of their trials.
>
> I was reading an analysis recently which stated that if you took the entire population of people to whom SSRIs are administered after a diagnosis of clinical depression and then you screened them by the criteria used for selecting patients for clinical trials, 90% of them would be excluded from participation in such trials. So they aren't typical enough to go into the research, but then researchers turn around and make recommendations based on a sample representing 10% of the population of interest and apply those recommendations to 100% of the population of interest.
>
> A large proportion of that 100% probably has a brain chemistry more like that of healthy volunteers than like that of the patients in the clinical trials. Thus one would expect the (highly problematic) healthy-volunteer trials to be more predictive of results than the clinical trials based on criteria that include only 10% of prospective users.
>
> Comments?
************** you appear to be pretty pessimistic...what is your proofsource for your "analysis?"...do you really think all pharm companies are bad?
PS there is a law...it passed in 1998 Freedom of information act...no study done is private...thats why you see both positive and negative trials. (and believe me...every pharm co knows what the others are studying so as to see if the outcome is positive or negative in its findings)
poster:pharmrep
thread:109458
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020922/msgs/120792.html