Patients don't care about conflicts of interest
about their health, not whether researchers have financial
interests in its outcome.
According to a survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine (355:22, 2330-2337), more than 90% of 253 patients questioned said they had little or no worry about financial ties that researchers or medical centres might have with drug companies.
Financial conflicts of interest could undermine the integrity of the science involved but, more importantly, could also impact on patient safety. The World Medical Association and others have called for such conflicts to be declared to patients. They claim this would help the patient judge whether or not to trust the trial and therefore participate.
However, critics argue that asking patients to make this judgement is unfair and just moves responsibility to those who have the least power to do anything about it.
Cancer patients were specifically chosen as earlier surveys had shown that patients would be less concerned with conflicts of interest if they suffered from life-threatening diseases.
The survey revealed that most patients would still have enrolled in the trial if the researcher had been paid by the pharmaceutical company for speaking (82 per cent), consultancy fees (75 per cent), owned stock (76 per cent) or received royalty payments (70 per cent).
Over three-quarters of the patients would also have participated if the cancer centre owned stock or received royalty payments from a drug company.
The results were independant of age, gender, race, religion, income, type of cancer, cancer centre involved or phase of study. However, those with a higher level of education were significantly more likely to be concerned about financial conflicts of interest even though more highly educated people had not heard or read any more about the subject.
The survey was conducted at five different US medical centres.
