In
a recent study, researchers aimed to discover how much of the antidepressant research literature is valid and how much is “hijacked for marketing purposes.” They looked at the largest, most influential clinical trials of antidepressants and found that almost half were so biased that they could be considered “seeding trials”—or studies that provide marketing materials for the pharmaceutical industry, not valid scientific data.
“Large trials are rare in the field of antidepressant research. In the few existing trials, key outcomes such as suicidality and the functional impact of mental disorders were little studied. A significant proportion of these trials could be marketing trials (‘seeding trials’),” the researchers write.
The study, led by Samuel Martineau at the University of Rennes, France, was published in BMJ Open. The researchers also included Florian Naudet and Ioana-Alina Cristea, who have co-authored previous studies on how
pharma undermines drug regulators in
multiple ways as well as how
medical journals make biased publication decisions.
