Department of Internal Medicine, American University of Beirut Medical Center, Beirut, Lebanon.
Clinical Research Institute, American University of Beirut Medical Center, Beirut, Lebanon.
J Clin Epidemiol. 2020 Nov;127:19-28. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.06.040. Epub 2020 Jul 3.
The objective of the study is to review the literature for studies that assessed the concordance of financial conflicts of interest disclosures with payments' databases and evaluate their methods.
We conducted a systematic survey of the health literature to identify eligible studies. We searched both Medline and EMBASE up to February 2017. We conducted study selection, data abstraction, and methodological quality assessment in duplicate and independently using standardized forms. We subcategorized 'nonconcordant disclosures' as either 'partially nonconcordant' or 'completely nonconcordant'. The main outcome was the percentage of authors with 'nonconcordant' disclosures. We summarized results by three levels of analysis: authors, companies, and studies.
We identified 27 eligible journal articles. The top two types of documents assessed were published articles (n = 13) and published guidelines (n = 9). The most commonly used payment database was the Open Payments Database (n = 16). The median percentage of authors with 'nonconcordant' disclosures was 81%; the median percentage was 43% for 'completely nonconcordant' disclosures. The percentage of 'nonconcordant' conflict of interest (COI) reporting by companies varied between 23% and 85%. The methods of concordance assessment, as well as the labeling and definitions of assessed outcomes varied widely across the included studies. We judged three of the included studies as high-quality studies.
Underreporting of health science researchers' financial COIs is pervasive. Studies assessing COI underreporting suffer from a number of limitations that could have overestimated their findings.
本研究旨在回顾评估财务利益冲突披露与支付数据库一致性的文献，并评价其方法。
我们系统地检索了卫生文献，以确定合格的研究。我们检索了 Medline 和 EMBASE，截至 2017 年 2 月。我们使用标准化表格进行了研究选择、数据提取和方法学质量评估的重复和独立评估。我们将“不一致披露”分为“部分不一致”或“完全不一致”。主要结果是作者“不一致”披露的百分比。我们通过三个分析水平总结结果：作者、公司和研究。
我们确定了 27 篇合格的期刊文章。评估的文件主要是出版文章（n=13）和出版指南（n=9）。最常用的支付数据库是公开支付数据库（n=16）。作者“不一致”披露的中位数百分比为 81%；“完全不一致”披露的中位数百分比为 43%。公司“不一致”利益冲突（COI）报告的百分比在 23%至 85%之间变化。一致性评估方法以及评估结果的标签和定义在纳入的研究中差异很大。我们判断纳入的三项研究为高质量研究。
健康科学研究人员财务利益冲突的漏报普遍存在。评估利益冲突漏报的研究存在许多局限性，这些局限性可能高估了他们的发现。
