Featured Review: Financial conflicts of interest in systematic reviews

The Cochrane Review ' Financial conflicts of interest in systematic reviews: associations with results, conclusions, and methodological quality ' has recently published. We talked to author Camilla Hansen to learn what the latest evidence says and why it is important.Can you please tell us about this Cochrane Review?" Systematic reviews summarise existing evidence on a specific research question. These summaries sometimes provide a basis for developing clinical guidelines and can have a major impact on how patients are treated. It is therefore essential that findings from systematic reviews are trustworthy. If not, we may end up wasting resources on interventions that don ’t actually work, or even harming patients by using interventions that are dangerous, rather than helpful.There is a lot of debate about the impact of financial conflicts of interest on research findings and their interpretation. This exact issue has been investigated in many methodology studies of financial conflicts of interest in primary research studies, mainly clinical trials; and these studies have shown that financial conflicts of interest do impact on the conclusions drawn from the randomised trials.In contrast, fewer methodological studies have investigated the impact of financial conflicts of interest in systematic reviews, and we are not aware of any previous attempt to bring these studies together into a methodological systematic review. We decided to fill this gap.We included ten studies that ...
Source: Cochrane News and Events - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: news