Research Issues
Top breast cancer researcher failed to disclose pharma payments
September 12th, 2018 One of the world’s top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like...
Protecting pregnant women in clinical trials is a delicate balancing act
September 12th, 2018 Treatment decisions during pregnancy are a balancing act that should be informed by available data and expert input, notes an article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Shifting the default from exclusion of pregnant women to a careful...Financial disclosure lacking in publication of clinical trials
A substantial proportion of pharmaceutical industry payments to authors of oncology clinical trials published in major scientific journals are not disclosed, research shows. The publications focused on clinical trials that tested new cancer...
Unpaywall transforms research as academic publishers start to crack
August 22nd, 2018 Unpaywall is a free service locates open-access articles and presents paywalled papers that have been legally archived and are freely available on other websites to users who hit a paywalled version. Now, after years of resistance, firms like...
NIH shuts down controversial study funded by alcohol companies
June 20th, 2018 The US National Institutes of Health will shut down a controversial industry-funded study of moderate drinking and heart disease after a task force found severe ethical and scientific lapses in the study’s planning and execution. Stat News reports...Small MRI sample size studies lack sufficient statistical power
Small sample sizes in studies using functional MRI to investigate brain connectivity and function are common in neuroscience, despite years of warnings that such studies likely lack sufficient statistical power. A new analysis reveals that...
Human drug trials compromised by poor animal research reporting
April 18th, 2018 Poor animal study design and reporting thwarts the ethical review of proposed human drug trials, according to a study led by researchers at Hannover Medical School in Germany in cooperation with researchers from McGill University, Canada. The...Duke University faces new NIH requirements after research misconduct
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently imposed unusual new requirements on researchers based at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who receive federal funds. Science Mag reports that the changes are a response to concerns over...
NHS scepticism over study claiming heart benefits of fasting diet
March 21st, 2018 A University of Surrey study that compares the 5:2 fasting diet with a daily calorie restriction diet and concludes that fasting could have a beneficial impact on some important risk markers for cardiovascular disease, has come under NHS criticsm,...Researchers challenge claims that sugar industry paid scientists to shift blame
In recent years, high-profile claims in the academic literature and popular press have alleged that the sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and emphasise instead the dangers of dietary...Warnings on side effects of epilepsy drug came 40 years too late
Warnings to young women who might become pregnant that the epilepsy drug sodium valproate could cause birth defects and developmental problems in their babies could have been made public more than 40 years ago, The Guardian reports UK campaigners...No adverse effects from light drinking in pregnancy but abstention still advised
A research review suggests that consuming even small amounts of alcohol in pregnancy may be linked with higher chances of having a small baby and delivering prematurely, but that there were actually very few studies investigating light drinking...Top UK university used overseas patients as research guinea pigs
Experimental implants that should only have been used in laboratory or animal tests were sent abroad and used on patients who were treated like human guinea pigs, an inquiry at University College London, one of Britain’s leading universities has...
BHIVA challenges recommendation on ART for HIV+ pregnant women
September 27th, 2017 The British HIV Association (BHIVA) has taken issue with a BMJ article regarding the PROMISE trial that led to a recommendation on the use of lopinavir/ritonavir for the treatment of HIV in adults, including in pregnant women. The trial compared...
Fury from LGBT rights groups over facial recognition study
September 20th, 2017 A facial recognition experiment that claims to be able to distinguish between gay and heterosexual people has sparked a row between its creators and two leading LGBT rights groups, reports BBC News. The Stanford University study claims its...