Author Interview: Conflicts of interest in clinical guidelines, advisory committee reports, opinion pieces, and narrative reviews: associations with recommendations

In this short interview, PhD student Camilla Hansen Nejstgaard,   from Cochrane Denmark and Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine Odense (CEBMO) at the University of Southern Denmark, tells us about how conflicts of interest may impact on recommendations of drugs and medical devices. She is the lead author of arecently published Cochrane Methodology Review on this topic.  What does this Cochrane review tell us about the impact of conflicts of interests in clinical guidelines, advisory committee reports, opinion pieces, and narrative reviews?The findings from our review indicate that financial conflicts of interest are associated with favourable recommendations in clinical guidelines, advisory committee reports, opinion pieces, and narrative reviews. As an example, this means that guidelines written by authors with financial conflicts of interest, more often have recommendations that are favourable towards a new drug treatment than guidelines written by authors without conflicts of interest. We included 21 studies in our review and conducted four separate analyses on each of the four types of documents. These analyses provided similar findings but had some statistical uncertainty around the size of the effect .We also investigated the impact of non-financial conflicts of interest. Such interest can occur, for example, when radiologists are authors of clinical guidelines on mammography screening (this is what we call specialty interests). However, we only found a single study in...
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