lederhosen

Was delighted to read this news: in an effort to fight publication bias, the editors of several prestigious medical journals - including J.AMA, NEJM, AIM, and Lancet - have announced that they will not publish drug research sponsored by pharmaceutical corporations unless that research is registered in a public database from the start.

Gregory Curfman, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said: "When a pharmaceutical company sponsors a clinical trial and the results turn out not to be in the best financial interests of the company, it has been our experience these results are never made public. They are buried away."

More than two-thirds of studies of anti-depressants given to depressed children, for instance, found the medications were no better than sugar pills, but companies published only the positive trials.

If all the studies had been registered from the start, doctors would have learned that the positive data were only a fraction of the total.