Comment by dgacmu
9 hours ago
In addition to the funding bias wikipedia article someone else already cited:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.MR...
> Sponsorship of drug and device studies by the manufacturing company leads to more favorable efficacy results and conclusions than sponsorship by other sources. Our analyses suggest the existence of an industry bias that cannot be explained by standard 'Risk of bias' assessments.
And no! It's not unusual, nor does it mean the results are wrong. It just means there's a known bias towards results that favor the sponsor's interests that needs to be taken into account when evaluating the research. Again, that doesn't make it wrong. But it should make you cautious before thinking that a single study (in a very specific sub-population, at that) is necessarily going to generalize. It might. I hope it does! GLP-1's are awesome. But cautiously.
This is a federally funded study. Says so in the bright yellow “Key takeaways” box at the top of TFA.
But ok, sure, drug companies bad. Man hn is really turning into Reddit these days.
Dude. From the paper itself:
"Competing interests G.A.M. serves as a research consultant for Merck, GlaxoSmithKline/ViiV, and Gilead. M.J.C. serves as a scientific advisor for TruDiagnostic. V.D. and R.S. are employees of TruDiagnostic. All other authors declare no competing interests."
These are known risk factors. I've never said drug companies are bad. I literally take corporate funding for my own research. But you also don't get to stick your head in the sand and ignore the competing interests that all make the research more likely to show favorable results. Again for those in the back: These results probably _are_ correct! But do they generalize? Will they hold up on replication with a larger population? Do they matter, or is the proxy they're measuring not actually relevant for long term things in humans? Dunno. That's the thing about a _statistical likelihood of bias_ -- you have no idea exactly how to apply it to a single paper other than to say "ok, known possibility of bias, interpret accordingly."
From your cite, as you quote:
Sponsorship of drug and device studies by the manufacturing company leads to more favorable efficacy results and conclusions than sponsorship by other sources.
This isn’t that. It’s just FUD in this context. Nobody casts aspersions about Google authors on their latest database query optimizer paper with Stanford.
1 reply →