July 25, 2015
Some evidence-based medicine stories
- Ben Goldacre has a piece at Buzzfeed, which is nonetheless pretty calm and reasonable, talking about the need for data transparency in clinical trials
- The Alltrials campaign, which is trying to get regulatory reform to ensure all clinical trials are published, was joined this week by a group of pharmaceutical company investors. This is only surprising until you think carefully: it’s like reinsurance companies and their interest in global warming — they’d rather the problems would go away, but there’s not profit in just ignoring them.
- The big potential success story of scanning the genome blindly is a gene called PCSK9: people with a broken version have low cholesterol. Drugs that disable PCSK9 lower cholesterol a lot, but have not (yet) been shown to prevent or postpone heart disease. They’re also roughly 100 times more expensive than the current drugs, and have to be injected. None the less, they will probably go on sale soon.
A survey of a convenience sample of US cardiologists found that they were hoping to use the drugs in 40% of their patients who have already had a heart attack, and 25% of those who have not yet had one.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »