Compare p-values from privately funded medical trials to those in publicly funded research?

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Sander Wagner writes:

I just read the post on ethical concerns in medical trials. As there seems to be a lot more pressure on private researchers i thought it might be a nice little exercise to compare p-values from privately funded medical trials with those reported from publicly funded research, to see if confirmation pressure is higher in private research (i.e. p-values are closer to the cutoff levels for significance for the privately funded research). Do you think this is a decent idea or are you sceptical? Also are you aware of any sources listing a large number of representative medical studies and their type of funding?

My reply:

This sounds like something worth studying. I don’t know where to get data about this sort of thing, but now that it’s been blogged, maybe someone will follow up.

4 thoughts on “Compare p-values from privately funded medical trials to those in publicly funded research?”

  1. Pretty much all medical journals require that authors disclose sources of funding, so the brute force way would be to extract this from the published articles. clinicaltrials.gov is also useful, for trials started since 2007.

    Personally, i would probably focus on effect sizes rather than p values, and compare them across funding sources, stratified by type of treatment and control.

    The following references may also be of use: http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/295/19/2270.abst…

    and: http://tinyurl.com/247c7nk

    Hope this helps.

  2. Studies funded by for profit organizations are substantially more likely to find beneficial effects of the treatment under study. It's a slightly problematic question, though, because developers specifically study products they are optimistic about and government will often research topics that are in practice but they are dubious about. Different results would be possible without corruption.

    But corruption there is – in publication bias, privately funded studies are much more likely to go unpublished, distorting the research infrastructure.

    See Bourgeois in Annals of Internal Medicine 2010, Rising in PLOS Medicine, or Lee and Sim PLOS Medicine.

  3. b: The confidence/expected findings point you make is relevant if the point is to compare the whole class of publicly funded trials to the whole class of privately funded ones.

    I was assuming, though, that the original poster was imagining making this comparison for particular drugs or drug types. Am I wrong about that?

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