Comparison of Schizophrenia Drugs Often Favors Firm Funding Study: "By Shankar Vedantam | Washington Post Staff Writer | Wednesday, April 12, 2006; Page A01
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 three out of four.
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In fact, when psychiatrist John Davis analyzed every publicly available trial funded by the pharmaceutical industry pitting five new antipsychotic drugs against one another, nine in 10 showed that the best drug was the one made by the company funding the study.
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By contrast, when the federal government recently compared a broader range of drugs in typical schizophrenia patients in a lengthy trial, two medications that stood out were cheaper drugs not under patent ...
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"A perfectly independent agency has to be set up that says, 'Here are the areas where trials must be done,' " said Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "There will be two classes of trials -- the believable ones and the non-believable ones."
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But several experts say industry-sponsored trials are failing to answer the questions doctors really need answered: Which drug works best for which patient? Are differences in drugs worth the differences in cost? How many patients are likely to recover entirely, rather than just show progress in the right direction? ...
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
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