citações versus financiamento

["Luis Paulo Vieira Braga" <lpbraga@im.ufrj.br>]

Industry-Sponsored Trials More Widely Cited Than Not-for-Profit Studies

(from Heart wire ­ a professional news service of WebMD)
http://www.theheart.org/index.do



Michael O'Riordan


September 10, 2008 (Boston, MA) ­ Cardiovascular clinical trials sponsored by 
industry are more likely to be cited in future medical publications than 
studies performed by not-for-profit organizations, a new study has shown. 
Efforts should be made to ensure that important trials conducted by 
government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are 
more widely disseminated to the cardiovascular community, say investigators.

"As a researcher, my core belief is that high-quality research gets done by 
the NIH and by industry, and the quality of our patients' lives will improve 
if this information is transmitted to the medical community," senior 
investigator Dr Paul Ridker (Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA) told 
heartwire. "What we observed is that the translation to practice is more 
rapid and thorough for industry-funded studies. We hope there can be a 
mechanism to do a better job promoting the findings of federally funded 
studies as well."

The results of the study, with first author Dr David Conen (Brigham and 
Women's Hospital), are published online September 8, 2008 in Circulation.

In 2006, Ridker and colleagues published a study showing that cardiovascular 
clinical trials funded by for-profit sponsors were significantly more likely 
to have positive results than trials reported by not-for-profit funding 
sources. He told heartwire that while the initial publication has an impact 
on clinical practice, how often the paper is cited in subsequent medical 
publications also has an effect on physician behavior. 

The purpose of this study, explained Ridker, was to examine how the 
cardiovascular community responded to high-quality research funded by 
different sources. To do so, the Harvard researchers analyzed 303 consecutive 
superiority trials of cardiovascular medicine published between January 1, 
2000 and July 30, 2005 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 
the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine. They then determined the 
number of citations per publication per year, a metric used to ascertain how 
the medical community was responding to the findings. 

Investigators observed that industry-funded studies had more citations per 
publication per year than NIH- or other federally funded studies. This was 
true in all settings except for one: industry-funded studies were not cited 
as frequently when the studies failed to show a benefit.