C Hammarquist

..To determine whether patients with asthma who are sensitive to mites benefit from measures designed to reduce their exposure to house dust mite antigen in the home...

..We therefore reviewed the methodological quality of the mammography trials and an influential Swedish meta-analysis, and did a meta-analysis ourselves...

..This debate examines how best to tackle ghostwriting in the medical literature from the perspectives of a researcher, an editor, and the professional medical writer...

..The prevailing culture of secrecy and ownership to data is not in the best interests of patients...

..However, these studies have been restricted to certain medical specialities. We compared all industry-supported meta-analyses of drug-drug comparisons with those without industry support...

..It is not known how reliable such meta-analyses are...

..We wanted to determine if a similar imbalance occurs in scientific articles on mammography screening and if it is related to author affiliation...

..95 (95% confidence interval = 0.88-1.02) versus odds ratio 0.99 (95% confidence interval = 0.81-1.23). Thus, B. E. Wampold et al.'s conclusion was not substantiated by their data, and is best characterized as powerful spin. ...

..The review fails to live up to the high standards required for Cochrane reviews...

..To estimate the extent of overdiagnosis (the detection of cancers that will not cause death or symptoms) in publicly organised screening programmes...

..To compare the reporting on blinding in protocols and articles describing randomized controlled trials...

..We investigated industry-supported trials' influence on journal impact factors and revenue...

..14 to 2.14; p = 0.03) over the total course of the trials. Augmentation therapy with alpha-1 antitrypsin cannot be recommended in view of the lack of evidence of clinical benefit and the cost of treatment...

..To investigate whether substantive criticism in electronic letters to the editor, defined as a problem that could invalidate the research or reduce its reliability, is adequately addressed by the authors...

..Given that the size of the bias was similar to the estimated screening effect, screening appeared ineffective...

....

..From the patient's point of view, both effects are important and should be investigated and reported similarly. We studied how they have been reported over time...

..We quantified overdiagnosis in the Danish mammography screening programme, which is uniquely suited for this purpose, as only 20% of the Danish population has been offered organised mammography screening over a long time-period...

..To study the inter-observer variation related to extraction of continuous and numerical rating scale data from trial reports for use in meta-analyses...

..The prevalence and nature of ghost authorship in industry-initiated randomised trials is not known...

..However, even trials in high impact journals may be small or may have inadequate quality. Critical appraisal of individual trials is always necessary, irrespective of the place of publication...

..Selective reporting of positive outcomes is associated with bias...

..aeruginosa lung infection improved with time (P = 0.008). Our study shows that CF patients who are treated intensively have lower antibody responses and longer survival after acquisition of chronic P. aeruginosa lung infection...

..Placebo treatments have been reported to help patients with many diseases, but the quality of the evidence supporting this belief has not been rigorously evaluated...

..These facts were not noted in any of the trial reports. We found similar constraints on publication rights in 44 protocols from 2004. This tight sponsor control over industry-initiated trials should be changed...

..These drugs have likely caused the deaths of thousands of patients. The use of all NSAIDs should be restricted as much as possible. Drug trials should be a public enterprise...

..To compare the distribution of P values in abstracts of randomised controlled trials with that in observational studies, and to check P values between 0.04 and 0.06...

..We explored whether use of fungal infection-related mortality as outcome rather than total mortality leads to bias in trials of antifungal agents in cancer patients...

..61 (95% CI, 0.50-0.73). Because high-quality trials failed to demonstrate a reduction in mortality, polyclonal immunoglobulin should not be used for treatment of sepsis except in randomized clinical trials...

....

..Assessing the risk of bias in individual studies in a systematic review can be done using individual components or by summarizing the study quality in an overall score...

....

..To assess if authors of randomised clinical trials convey the fact that they have used surrogate outcomes and discussed their validity...

..To study how composite outcomes, which have combined several components into a single measure, are defined, reported, and interpreted...

..To study the analgesic effect of acupuncture and placebo acupuncture and to explore whether the type of the placebo acupuncture is associated with the estimated effect of acupuncture...

....

..It is not known to which extent spontaneous improvement, effect of placebo and effect of active interventions contribute to the observed change from baseline, and we aimed at quantifying these contributions...