(Reuters Health)—A new study shows how fake news—specifically, information about scientific research that may be tainted by fraud—keeps getting spread through the medical literature, misleading doctors about the safety and effectiveness of the drugs they prescribe.
At issue is the failure of medical journals to flag research that’s been identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as potentially fraudulent, a task made difficult by the FDA itself.
The error is compounded when such studies are combined into so-called meta-analyses that perpetuate the error or fraud, according to a new analysis released March 4 online in JAMA Internal Medicine.1
It found that if studies with falsified data had been excluded, some of those meta-analyses would have painted a very different picture for one drug — the $1.6 billion-a-year clot-preventing medicine apixaban, which is sold by Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co under the brand name Eliquis.