If you pick up a newspaper or read an online magazine on any given day, one can always find stories about medication errors or medical malpractice stories involving the mis-prescription of pharmaceutical drugs. The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars each year to marketing their drugs to patients and doctors alike, but how far reaching is pharma's influence on drug trials and research?

According to recent analysis of drug trials published Monday, drug studies and trials that were funded by drug companies were much more likely to produce positive results and show that the drug worked than independent or university funded studies.

Analysis of nearly 546 drug trials found that pharmaceutical funded trials reported positive outcomes 85 percent of the time compared with 50 percent for government-funded trials and nonprofit or non-federal organizations which received positive results 72 percent of the time.

Furthermore, researchers found that studies funded by nonprofit or non-federal organizations that received partial funding from drug companies were more likely to be positive (85 percent) than those that did not have any drug company contributions (61 percent).

Some believe that the results between studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry are usually more successful because those companies are much stricter on the type of study it funds and only invests in those with a high probability of success. The federal government usually funds trials that are at earlier stages in the process and have a sometimes lower rate of success.

The study was published on Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The study was funded by the National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Source: Los Angeles Times "Drug studies funded by industry are more likely to yield good news" 08/02/2010