Drug companies in UK not sharing complete information on clinical trials with doctors: MPs

Drug companies in the UK hve been accused of not sharing results of clinical trials with doctors, leaving them poorly informed about how to treat patients a powerful committee of British parliamentarians said.

The public accounts expressed ''extreme concern'' that pharmaceutical companies only published around half of completed trial results and were more likely to withhold unfavourable results.

According to the committee, experts had not been able to reach an agreement on how well flu drug Tamiflu worked and their discussions had been ''hampered'' as important information has been held back.

Figures released last year showed the Department of Health spent £424 million on stockpiling Tamiflu, but had to write off £74 million of its stockpile due to poor record-keeping by the National Health Service (NHS).

Richard Bacon, MP for south Norfolk, said, it was very difficult to tell what was and what was not dangerous when the information was not publicly available.

He added, the withholding of information of trial results ''has ramifications for the whole of medicine''.

He added, the ability of doctors, researchers and patients to make informed decisions about treatments was being undermined.

The committee noted that an NHS National Institute for Health Research review in 2010 estimated that the chance of completed trials being published was roughly half and trials with positive results were about twice as likely to be published as trials with negative results.

The MPs were told by Dr Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal, that the pharmaceutical industry published more positive results than negative ones from their trials.

She added that the journal had published very clear summaries of systematic reviews of data on individual medicines or classes of medicines where, on adding together the published and unpublished evidence, a very different picture of the quality and effectiveness of those emerged.

Non-profit Chochrane Collaboration's review of  20 existing studies into Tamiflu found it did not  reduce influenza-related lower respiratory tract complications but did caused nausea.

It was now receiving full clinical study reports from manufacturer Roche, which were being used for completion of a further review of the effectiveness of Tamiflu.

The MPs also called on ministers to initiate  action to make full trial results available to doctors and researchers for all treatments currently being prescribed and carry out regular audits of how much information was being made available.