Important information on the efficacy of new drugs and treatments is going unpublished, posing a risk to health, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee says.
Despite repeated warnings, not enough is being done to make sure the results of all clinical trials are reported. Nearly half of clinical trials go unreported, evidence suggests. It means some clinical decisions are made without all the available data. In some cases, this might endanger human life.
They give the example of heart drug lorcainide, which was tested in 1980. The results showed that people who were taking it were more likely to die than those who were not, but those findings were not published until 1993 - long after it was made available to patients in the US.
The committee also heard that "publication bias" may have led to UK public money being wasted, for example when the government's decided to spend £424m to stockpile Tamiflu in response to the H1N1 "swine flu" epidemic in 2009. Dr Simon Kolstoe, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth and chairman of two ethics committees, told the committee: "Eight out of the 10 trials that were used by the company to show the drug was useful in preventing complications such as pneumonia had never actually been peer-reviewed or published." He said this meant governments were "relying on a marketing spiel claiming successful trials of this drug, rather than being able to consider the actual evidence of the drug efficacy for themselves".
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