Slashdot Mirror
Disappointing Cancer Study Results Go Unreported
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."
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.
This very subject was addressed, very eloquently as usual, by Richard Feynman in his famous Cargo Cult Science lecture.
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.
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.
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.