About 20% Of Clinical Trials Designed Mostly For Marketing Purpose

[haidut]

Not that this will surprise anybody on this forum but worth a mention anyways.

http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-medicine/2016/01/21/clinical-drug-trials-marketing-science/

"...We then extracted the trial characteristics, comparing those that were marketing to those that were not and analyzed if they clustered together into certain groups, which could make future identification easier.
From our judgments, we found 1 in 5 trials were more likely to be designed for marketing purposes when compared to those that were not. Marketing trials were more likely to have noteworthy manufacturer contributions to the authorship, data analysis and the reporting."

"...Marketing trials were more likely to focus on surrogate and composite outcomes (though not necessarily use as the primary outcome measure). These endpoints are often not important to patients, are less likely to influence practice and have been extensively criticized for their overuse. Marketing trials were also more likely to include generalizable language when it came to describing the intervention in everyday practice, potentially encouraging its use outside of the researched study population."

 

[Blossom]

I'm honestly surprised it's not more than 20%!

 

[acrylic]

Here's a whole book specifically on this subject: http://amzn.to/1S79KWw

"Every year the average number of prescriptions purchased by Americans increases, as do healthcare expenditures, which are projected to reach one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020. In Drugs for Life, Joseph Dumit considers how our burgeoning consumption of medicine and cost of healthcare not only came to be, but also came to be taken for granted. For several years, Dumit attended pharmaceutical industry conferences; spoke with marketers, researchers, doctors, and patients; and surveyed the industry's literature regarding strategies to expand markets for prescription drugs. He concluded that underlying the continual growth in medications, disease categories, costs, and insecurity is a relatively new perception of ourselves as inherently ill and in need of chronic treatment. This perception is based on clinical trials that we have largely outsourced to pharmaceutical companies. Those companies in turn see clinical trials as investments and measure the value of those investments by the size of the market and profits that they will create. They only ask questions for which the answer is more medicine. Drugs for Lifechallenges our understanding of health, risks, facts, and clinical trials, the very concepts used by pharmaceutical companies to grow markets to the point where almost no one can imagine a life without prescription drugs."

 

[Blossom]

Thanks acrylic. I love books that discuss the problem of the ever increasing medicalization of our lives and this seems like a valuable one to read.

 

[tobieagle]

Here's a whole book specifically on this subject: http://amzn.to/1S79KWw

"Every year the average number of prescriptions purchased by Americans increases, as do healthcare expenditures, which are projected to reach one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020. In Drugs for Life, Joseph Dumit considers how our burgeoning consumption of medicine and cost of healthcare not only came to be, but also came to be taken for granted. For several years, Dumit attended pharmaceutical industry conferences; spoke with marketers, researchers, doctors, and patients; and surveyed the industry's literature regarding strategies to expand markets for prescription drugs. He concluded that underlying the continual growth in medications, disease categories, costs, and insecurity is a relatively new perception of ourselves as inherently ill and in need of chronic treatment. This perception is based on clinical trials that we have largely outsourced to pharmaceutical companies. Those companies in turn see clinical trials as investments and measure the value of those investments by the size of the market and profits that they will create. They only ask questions for which the answer is more medicine. Drugs for Lifechallenges our understanding of health, risks, facts, and clinical trials, the very concepts used by pharmaceutical companies to grow markets to the point where almost no one can imagine a life without prescription drugs."

This is sick.

Thanks for the quote.