What is the possibility the new therapy to be better than the current one?
Many of the new experimental drugs are not more effective than their predecessors
Slightly more than half of the new therapies are proving to be better than the present ones, according to a new systematic review, published in the Cochrane database. The fact that many of the new experimental drugs are not more effective may sound frustrating, but it really is a good indicator of the quality and reliability of clinical trials.
Randomised trials compared the effects of one treatment with another. In these trials the patients were allocated to different treatment groups at random to ensure the objectivity and reliability of the survey’s findings. When testing a new treatment, expectations and hopes are that it will be better than previously approved treatments with which it is compared. These expectations lead to an ethical dilemma. If researchers know in advance which treatment is better, they would intentionally give patients a half ineffective therapy. If the clinical trial is ethical, therefore, only half of new therapies might prove better than the present.
Researchers studied records of 743 randomized trials with 297 774 patients. Studies explored new experimental drugs for cancer, neurological and other diseases. On average, less than half of the new drugs were superior to the older ones. This is good news because it means that during the study the researchers do not really know which treatment is better.
The authors of the study found that this trend can be traced back for more than fifty years. They finally answer to the question, asked by Iain Chalmers – founder of Cochrane Collaboration fifteen years ago. In 1997, in a letter to the British Medical Journal, he placed the following problem: What is the possibility the new therapy to be better than the current one?
This study gives the best possible answer.
Source : dailyhealtharticles[dot]com
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