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Disappointing Cancer Study Results Go Unreported

Posted by timothy on from the laetrile-is-delicious dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Science News reports on a new study showing that most cancer drug trial results are never published, probably leaving patients vulnerable to cocktails that have already been shown to be dangerous or useless."

9 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. First Post ... sadly by fygment · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Where's the surprise in this? No news here.

    --
    "Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
    1. Re:First Post ... sadly by moderatorrater · · Score: 4, Insightful

      First of all, the mod who gave you "redundant" apparently doesn't realize that this has been widely known for a long time.

      Second, this is new because someone's done the actual study and shown the degree to which studies don't go reported. Even if only half of the unreported studies were because of poor results, that's enough to skew things very, very badly.

      Anyone doing this should get put in jail for a long, long time. It may not be fraud in the sense that they're publishing fraudulent results, but by not publishing results they're creating fraudulent overall data, with possibly deadly results. This needs to stop.

  2. More complaining and second-guessing by Kohath · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Cancer patients are already vulnerable to cancer.

    Not sure what the point of this story is. Sometimes things don't work out the way everyone wishes they would. Apparently every decision to say something or not say something always has to be second-guessed by third parties who have no responsibility or accountability -- but they get to demand things anyway.

    I'm sure a lot more of these failed trials would be published if there was a financial incentive. The complainers should start a foundation and start paying the people who have better things to do than to write papers and publish info that's of no use to them. They should do that instead of complaining.

    1. Re:More complaining and second-guessing by BabyDave · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The point of the story is that companies publish the successful trials on a drug, but don't publish failed trials on that same drug - i.e. they cherry-pick the results.

    2. Re:More complaining and second-guessing by nedlohs · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not just cherry picking - which wouldn't matter so much in itself. Drugs are very hit and miss you expect lots of things to just not work.

      The problem is they study drugs X, Y, and Z in combination and find that not only does it not help it makes the patients worse. They don't bother publishing since they didn't get anything useful out of it and no one is going to cite them...

      A year later another group decides to study X, Y, and Z in combination. So a pointless study that harms patients is done because this second group never found out about the previous study in their literature search.

  3. Cargo Cult Science by McGregorMortis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This very subject was addressed, very eloquently as usual, by Richard Feynman in his famous Cargo Cult Science lecture.

  4. Nothing new by edcheevy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's called the "file drawer problem" and impacts every field of science. If you don't find significant results, you don't get published, and you stick your "failed" study in the file drawer. As a result, "failed" studies on ANY topic usually get swept away. It's unfortunate, but there's nothing particular sinister about it (as the article seems to imply). There's just no incentive to publish the trials and studies that didn't work.

  5. Re:Cancer treatment is a product by zippthorne · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No, they'd much rather have those 10 years worth of payments up front, so they can invest or re-invest it.

    You seriously don't think people would pay more for a week-long cure than for a week's worth of "treatment-in-perpetuity?"

    --
    Can you be Even More Awesome?!
  6. Re:I'm publishing the results of a failed cancer t by adamofgreyskull · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My mother went through a 6 week series of trials of epsom salts against colo-rectal cancer.

    The mixture was ineffective.

    My, how very useful this information is for cancer patients!

    Yes, because that is exactly the same thing. *sigh*

    Would my mother have received the quality of the care she eventually did get if her doctors had missed relevant articles in medical journals thanks to the massive signal to noise ratio?

    If every failure were published, the cancer research community would suffer the same "eternal september" the usenet community did.

    What if the researchers developing new drugs and treatments had access to the failures of others so that they knew what *not* to try. Outside of your pathetically childish and facetious example about Epsom salts, this information could be invaluable. Would you have wanted your mother to die because scientists working for Pfizer didn't tell the community about a failed treatment that they had already tried which GlaxoSmithkline then spent 2 years replicating, at the expense of another possibly more fruitful avenue of research?