More non-industry funded research is needed to further assess the impact of funding on methodological quality, reported clinical outcomes and authors' conclusions.
Majority of RCTs were industry funded, more non-industry funded research is needed to further assess the impact of funding on methodological quality, reported clinical outcomes and authors' conclusions.
There was a significant association between funding and methodological quality of RCTs in the domains of incomplete outcome data and free of other bias.
There was no significant association between source of funding and methodological quality of study in the domains of sequence generation, allocation concealment and blinding.
The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/10/247/prepub We are grateful to the Belgian Federal Healthcare Knowledge Center (KCE) for the study funding and methodological advice.
The outcomes included: 1) Source of funding, 2) Methodological quality (Risk of bias), 3) Clinical outcomes in RCTs, 4) Conclusions (Overall study conclusions and conclusions on reported clinical outcomes) and 5) Association between source of funding and methodological quality, clinical outcomes and author's conclusions.
We investigated the level of dedicated funding for methodological support provided by Trusts' R&D departments in relation to their level of allocated DH R&D support funding and the number of research projects registered using Spearman's rank correlation.
More industry sponsored trials had low risk of bias in 5 out of 6 domains, even though our results did not show a statistical significant association between funding and methodological quality in most domains.
Within the 24 Trusts that provided complete information, there did not appear to be any relationship between the R&D funding for methodological support and the annual number of registered projects (figure 1, spearman rank correlation -0.01).
