Widespread fraud in natural health products research

Alan Gaby, the assistant editor of the journal Integr Med has written an interesting commentary about widespread fraud in natural health products research. Here is an excerpt of his article:

During the past 49 years, I have reviewed and analyzed more than 50 000 papers from the biomedical literature, most of which were related to the field of nutritional medicine. Doing this work has given me some understanding of how to assess the reliability of a study. Over the past 10 to 15 years, an uncomfortably large and growing number of published papers related to my area of expertise have left me wondering whether the research was fabricated; that is, whether people were writing papers about research that had not actually been conducted. If the studies were not actually conducted, the publishing of this research is an affront to all who value integrity in science, and it has the potential to harm practitioners and patients who rely on its findings.

The studies that have raised concerns have come primarily from Iran and to a lesser extent from Egypt, China, India, Japan, and a few other countries. Characteristics of these concerning studies typically include one or more of the following:

1. The study comes from an investigator or research group that has published an enormous number of randomized clinical trials in a relatively short period of time.
2. The number of participants in the trial is unusually large, when considering the resources that appear to be available to the researchers.
3. The recruitment period for the trial is unusually short.
4. The paper is submitted to a journal unusually rapidly after the study is completed, or in some cases before it would have been possible to have completed the trial.
5. A randomized double-blind trial is conducted before there is any preliminary evidence of efficacy in humans (such as case reports or uncontrolled trials). Because double-blind trials are expensive to conduct, such trials are generally reserved for treatments for which there is some evidence of efficacy.
6. The magnitude of the reported improvement is much larger than is typically seen in trials using just one or two nutrients.
7. No funding source is listed or the study is listed as self-funded. This is of particular concern when the sample size or study design suggests that the study was expensive.
8. The design of the study raises ethical issues, such as participants not being permitted to use treatments that are known to be effective.
9. One or more baseline characteristics of the study group appear to be implausible.
10. The research was conducted by a student as part of a graduate school thesis, and the magnitude of the project seems to have been beyond the capabilities and resources of a student.

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What Gaby alludes to is a problem indeed. I have previously posted about the Chinese aspect of this story. What Gaby does not mention is the fact that even many studies of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) which seem to be not overtly fraudulent are nevertheless highly suspect. I am referring to trials that are fatally flawed and/or studies that draw unwarranted conclusions. These are, of course, the types of studies that are the main target of this blog. Because they are so numerous, I feel that the damage they do is much bigger than that of the more overtly fraudulent papers.