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Health

Big pharma calling journals' shots?

11 October 2006

MONEY talks, and the drug industry’s dollar talks loud and clear through the pages of leading medical journals. That’s the conclusion of Peter Gøtzsche and his team at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, who compared reviews of drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies with similar reviews done without industry support.

The Danish team was looking for bias in meta-analyses, which combine results from multiple drug studies to establish the effectiveness of an experimental drug compared with an established treatment. To ensure a fair comparison, they matched studies that were published within two years of one another and…

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