Mr Morgan's law firm could benefit from having Mr Crist in the governor's office, with veto power over legislation unfavourable to trial lawyers.
And trials which gave a favourable verdict are about twice as likely to be published as trials giving unfavourable results.
However, there clearly are certain jobs where we have to pay people to do a task, and then pay them again to do it properly.Bob Walder LondonScientific newsSIR – Your article on the suppression of "unfavourable information" about drug trials implied that academic journals have some sort of duty to publish negative results for the public good ("Absence of evidence", November 29th).
This condition × group interaction was particularly strong in trials with unfavourable odds (6 : 4 box ratio: F 1,40) = 5.73, P = 0.021; 7 : 3 box ratio: F 1,40) = 11.34, P = 0.002) rather than favourable odds (9 : 1 box ratio: F 1,40) = 0.29, P = 0.59; 8 : 2 box ratio: F 1,40) = 2.97, P = 0.092), indicating that the group difference was strongest at the lower odds.
65, 66 While a large armamentarium of treatment options for IBS-C is available, the majority of these options lack proven efficacy from clinical trial data and/or have unfavourable side-effect profiles.
Thousands of clinical trials have never been registered with oversight agencies and results from around half of all clinical trials (often those with unfavourable results) remain unpublished.
More recently, the premature closure of the cellulose sulphate trials was based on an unfavourable risk-benefit ratio resulting in a higher rate of HIV seroconversion in the treatment arm [ 7].
In retrospective trials, survivin expression correlated with unfavourable neuroblastoma (Adida et al, 1998a), reduced overall survival in primitive colorectal (Kawasaki et al, 1998) and recurrent colorectal cancer (Sarela et al, 2000), non-small-cell lung cancer (Monzo et al, 1999), breast cancer (Tanaka et al, 2000), and increased rates of recurrences in bladder cancer (Swana et al, 1999).
Despite unfavourable results in the early studies, the CESAR trial showed improved disability-free survival at 6 months in 90 patients who were randomised to receive ECMO (37% vs. 53% on LPV, P = 0.03) [ 13].
He pointed out that Dr Alex Wodak, president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, cited a journal review that identified 82 favourable controlled trials, while only nine returned anything unfavourable.
