Animal studies produce many false positives (An explanation of why that's so.)

Nature News ^ | 16 July 2013 | Heidi Ledford

[neverdem]

Examination of neurological disease research shows pervasive ‘significance bias’.

A statistical analysis of more than 4,000 data sets from animal studies of neurological diseases has found that almost 40% of studies reported statistically significant results — nearly twice as many as would be expected on the basis of the number of animal subjects. The results suggest that the published work — some of which was used to justify human clinical trials — is biased towards reporting positive results.

This bias could partly explain why a therapy that does well in preclinical studies so rarely predicts success in human patients, says John Ioannidis, a physician who studies research methodology at Stanford University in California, and who is a co-author on the study published today in PLoS Biology1. “The results are too good to be true,” he says.

Ioannidis’s team is not the first to find fault with animal studies: others have highlighted how small sample sizes and unblinded studies can skew results. Another key factor is the tendency of researchers to publish only positive results, leaving negative findings buried in lab notebooks. Creative analyses are also likely culprits, says Ioannidis, such as selecting the statistical technique that gives the best result.

These problems that can affect patient care in hospitals, cautions Matthias Briel, an epidemiologist at University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland. Preclinical studies influence clinical guidelines when human data are lacking, he says. “A lot of clinical researchers are not aware that animal studies are not as well planned as clinical trials,” he adds.

Significantly skewed

Ioannidis and his colleagues mined a database of meta-analyses — analyses of data from multiple studies — of neurological disease research on animals. They focused on 160 meta-analyses of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and spinal-cord injury, among others...

[huldah1776]

Not surprised. The economy is recovering, too.

[Cyman]

I was just going to pull up Ioannidas’ bio but saw he was quoted. Brilliant man indeed