The influence of industry sponsorship and other financial conflicts of interest on the outcomes and quality of systematic reviews

Tags: Poster
Hansen C1, Lundh A1, Rasmussen K2, Frandsen TF3, Gøtzsche P2, Hróbjartsson A1
1Center for Evidence-Based Medicine, Odense University Hospital and University of Southern Denmark, 2Nordic Cochrane Centre, Rigshospitalet, 3Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark

Background: Funding of systematic reviews by drug, device and imaging companies, and other conflicts of interest may impact how reviews are conducted.

Objective: To investigate to which degree industry funding and other financial conflicts of interest are associated with results, conclusions and methodological quality of systematic reviews.

Methods: Cochrane methodology review. We searched PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Methodology Register. Furthermore, we searched the reference lists of included studies and Web of Science for studies citing any of the included studies. We included observational studies of any design that investigated systematic reviews with and without industry funding or other financial conflicts of interest, published up to November 2016. For studies to be eligible, they had to investigate at least one of our outcomes: effect-size estimates, favourable conclusions, and methodological quality.

Two authors independently assessed full text of potentially eligible studies, extracted data, and assessed risk of bias by assessing adequacy in relation to study inclusion, data extraction, and comparability of the investigated samples of systematic reviews.

We plan to assess the associations between industry funding including other financial conflicts of interest and each of our outcomes in a meta-analysis, if meaningful. Due to the anticipated heterogeneity between the observational studies, we will use random-effects models. If meta-analysis is not meaningful, the results will be reported descriptively.

Results: Our search identified 5227 records. As of February 2017, we have included 8 observational studies with a total of 877 systematic reviews. Four observational studies investigated systematic reviews of specific drugs, 2 observational studies investigated matched pairs of industry and non-industry supported systematic reviews of drugs, 1 cross-sectional study investigated systematic drug reviews, and 1 observational study investigated network meta-analyses comparing different drugs. Results will be available for the Summit.

Conclusions: Will be available for the Summit.