Assessing concordance of financial conflicts of interest disclosures with payments’ databases: a systematic survey of the health literature

El-Rayess, Hebah M.; Khamis, Assem M.; Haddad, Sara; Ghaddara, Hussein Abou; Hakoum, Maram B; Ichkhanian, Yervant; Bejjani, Michael; Akl, Elie A.

doi:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.06.040

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…12 13 Open Payments increases transparency of FCOIs by enabling cross-checking information collected by professional organisations, 14 conference organisers 15 and scientific journals. 16 It also aids identifying corruption by highlighting unusual payment patterns. 17 18 Unlike the USA, in most European countries, drug company payments are disclosed via industry self-regulation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accessibility and quality of drug company disclosures of payments to healthcare professionals and organisations in 37 countries: a European policy review

et al. 2021

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ObjectivesTo examine the accessibility and quality of drug company payment data in Europe.DesignComparative policy review of payment data in countries with different regulatory approaches to disclosure.Setting37 European countries.ParticipantsEuropean Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, its trade group and their drug company members; eurosfordocs.eu, an independent database integrating payments disclosed by companies and trade groups; regulatory bodies overseeing payment disclosure.Main outcome measuresRegulatory approaches to disclosure (self-regulation, public regulation, combination of the two); data accessibility (format, structure, searchability, customisable summary statistics, downloadability) and quality (spectrum of disclosed characteristics, payment aggregation, inclusion of taxes, recipient or donor identifiers).ResultsOf 30 countries with self-regulation, five had centralised databases, with Disclosure UK displaying the highest accessibility and quality. In 23 of the remaining countries with self-regulation and available data, disclosures were published in the portable document format (PDF) on individual company websites, preventing the public from understanding payment patterns. Eurosfordocs.eu had greater accessibility than any industry-run database, but the match between the value of payments integrated in eurosfordocs.eu and summarised separately by industry in seven countries ranged between 56% and 100% depending on country. Eurosfordocs.eu shared quality shortcomings with the underlying industry data, including ambiguities in identifying payments and their recipients. Public regulation was found in 15 countries, used either alone (3), in combination (4) or in parallel with (8) self-regulation. Of these countries, 13 established centralised databases with widely ranging accessibility and quality, and sharing some shortcomings with the industry-run databases. The French database, Transparence Santé, had the highest accessibility and quality, exceeding that of Disclosure UK.ConclusionsThe accessibility and quality of payment data disclosed in European countries are typically low, hindering investigation of financial conflicts of interest. Some improvements are straightforward but reaching the standards characterising the widely researched US Open Payments database requires major regulatory change.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accessibility and quality of drug company disclosures of payments to healthcare professionals and organisations in 37 countries: a European policy review

et al. 2021

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“…A recent systematic survey reported ndings from primary studies that assessed the concordance of disclosures of nancial con ict of interest with databases of payments for 27 included documents including both published articles, guidelines and meeting disclosures [11]. The range of completely non-concordant' disclosures was median 43% (range 15-89%).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflict of Interest and Risk of Bias in Systematic Reviews on Methylphenidate for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Snellman

Carlberg

Olsson

2023

Preprint

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Background Systematic reviews (SR) are crucial to evidence-based medicine, but associated conflict of interest remains under-investigated. We set out to compare disclosure of financial conflicts of interest (fCOI) of authors with publically available information and risk of bias (RoB) in SR on the effect of Methylphenidate for treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Methods A librarian searched Medline, Cochrane Library, Embase and PsycInfo in December, 2020. PRISMA guidelines were adopted for selection. Two blinded researchers independently searched open websites for information on fCOI for all authors of all included SR. ´ Disclosure on fCOI was extracted from full-text versions of SR. RoB was judged using Cochrane´s tool for SR. Results Disclosure on fCOI was missing for 2/44 (5%) included SR. For 15 (34%) SR, at least one author disclosed fCOI, and confirmed by open websites in all cases. Authors of 27 (61%) SR disclosed no fCOI, but discordant information was publically available for 8 (30%). In all, 23/44 (55%) of SR were associated with fCOI. RoB was high for 37/44 (84%) SR; 18 (49%) with and 19 (51%) without fCOI noticed on open websites. For the remaining 7 SR with low risk of bias, the corresponding figures were 6 (86%) with and 1 (14%) without fCOI. Conclusion The findings indicated an underreporting of fCOI corresponding to one third of SR disclosing no fCOI, methodological shortcomings were common, and 43/44 (98%) SR were compromised by either high RoB, or by fCOI. Similar investigations on other topics for comparison are warranted.

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“…As a consequence, non‐commercially funded trials that received free trial interventions from commercial companies will be coded differently across meta‐analyses. Second, incomplete reporting of funding source 62 and trial authors' conflicts of interest 63 may introduce information bias. Third, some studies primarily investigate commercial funding, while other studies solely use commercial funding as a descriptive or adjustment factor.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combining meta‐epidemiological study datasets on commercial funding of randomised clinical trials: Database, methods, and descriptive results of the COMFIT study

Nejstgaard

Lundh

Abdi

et al. 2021

Research Synthesis Methods

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Randomised trials are often funded by commercial companies and methodological studies support a widely held suspicion that commercial funding may influence trial results and conclusions. However, these studies often have a risk of confounding and reporting bias. The risk of confounding is markedly reduced in meta‐epidemiological studies that compare fairly similar trials within meta‐analyses, and risk of reporting bias is reduced with access to unpublished data. Therefore, we initiated the COMmercial Funding In Trials (COMFIT) study aimed at investigating the impact of commercial funding on estimated intervention effects in randomised clinical trials based on a consortium of researchers who agreed to share meta‐epidemiological study datasets with information on meta‐analyses and trials included in meta‐epidemiological studies. Here, we describe the COMFIT study, its database, and descriptive results. We included meta‐epidemiological studies with published or unpublished data on trial funding source and results or conclusions. We searched five bibliographic databases and other sources. We invited authors of eligible meta‐epidemiological studies to join the COMFIT consortium and to share data. The final construction of the COMFIT database involves checking data quality, identifying trial references, harmonising variable categories, and removing non‐informative meta‐analyses as well as correlated meta‐analyses and trial results. We included data from 17 meta‐epidemiological studies, covering 728 meta‐analyses and 6841 trials. Seven studies (405 meta‐analyses, 3272 trials) had not published analyses on the impact of commercial funding, but shared unpublished data on funding source. On this basis, we initiated the construction of a combined database. Once completed, the database will enable comprehensive analyses of the impact of commercial funding on trial results and conclusions with increased statistical power and a markedly reduced risk of confounding and reporting bias.

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Assessing concordance of financial conflicts of interest disclosures with payments’ databases: a systematic survey of the health literature

Cited by 16 publications

References 31 publications

Accessibility and quality of drug company disclosures of payments to healthcare professionals and organisations in 37 countries: a European policy review

Accessibility and quality of drug company disclosures of payments to healthcare professionals and organisations in 37 countries: a European policy review

Conflict of Interest and Risk of Bias in Systematic Reviews on Methylphenidate for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Combining meta‐epidemiological study datasets on commercial funding of randomised clinical trials: Database, methods, and descriptive results of the COMFIT study

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