This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Medical Practice  • Conflict of Interest  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Randomized Controlled Trial  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Dr Als-Nielsen and colleagues¹ stated that "[i]n principle, about half of all trials should favor the control intervention." The authors' findings reflect that expectation that "The experimental drug was recommended as treatment of choice in . . . 51% of trials funded by for-profit organizations." The authors do not explain, however, why the trials performed by nonprofit organizations had a lower percentage.

The authors also stated that "[t]rials funded by for-profit organizations had better methodological quality than trials funded by nonprofit organizations regarding allocation concealment and double blinding." In my experience, scientists working for for-profit companies are held both by scientific rigor and by the US Food and Drug Administration to very high standards of procedure, conduct, patient availability and selection, randomization, blinding, statistical evaluation, and so on. Besides, companies often review clinical protocols even when they supply only drugs and placebos, not funds, for trials. Thus . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Jonathan B. Rosefsky, MD
Department of Pediatrics
Jefferson Medical College
Philadelphia, Pa

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?