5 ms·

Imagine if a drug company ran a study 100 times before finding a "significant" result that supported the claims they wanted to make about their product. Withou

Imagine if a drug company ran a study 100 times before finding a "significant" result that supported the claims they wanted to make about their product. Without the other 99 studies, the single study is highly misleading.

pixl97 6y ago
Depends what methodologies were changed between studies. If people with a particular gene were effected, but said expression was very rare then you might have a huge number of studies that show no effect, but were highly effective in that one case.
- rebuilder 6y ago
  Exactly, so if you only published the one study where this rare gene was present in a participant, you'd get a wildly distorted picture of the general effectiveness of your intervention.
  - pixl97 6y ago
    The issue comes in, especially in future medicines that only target particular genes, that you only care about the effectiveness in that limited case.
    - rebuilder 6y ago
      In that case, wouldn't you screen the trial participants for that gene?
PeterisP 6y ago
That's why you should implement (and require) pre-registration of clinical studies - however, that still just means that everyone knows that there are the other 99 unsuccessful studies, not that they will get written up in detail and published.