Financial relationships between organizations that produce clinical practice guidelines and biomedical companies are not being properly disclosed, according to findings from a recent report.
When guidelines are released to the public, certain recommendations are often called into question, with suspicion quickly turning to any financial conflicts of interest from developers. If there is no disclosure statement revealing any those conflicts of interest, parties interested in the guidelines may cast doubt on their efficacy and reliability or unknowingly utilize guidelines with an inherent bias.
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For their report, authors led by Henry T Stelfox, University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada), conducted a cross-sectional survey and review of websites and organizations responsible for producing 290 clinical practice guidelines published on the National Guideline Clearinghouse website in 2012.
After compiling survey responses and reviewing all the published guidelines, the researchers found that only 63% of organizations producing clinical guidelines reported receiving funds from a biomedical company while 80% of those organizations reported having policies in place for managing potential conflicts of interest.
Which financial relationships were disclosed varied significantly based on the organization publishing the guidelines: 6% of the guidelines (18 of 290) disclosed direct funding from biomedical companies; 40% (117/290) disclosed financial relationships between committee members and biomedical companies; and 1% (4/290) disclosed financial relationships between the organization producing the guidelines and biomedical companies.
In terms of how guidelines changed based on their financial relationships, those produced by organizations with more comprehensive conflict of interest policies were less likely to include positive recommendations for patented biomedical products. They were also more likely to have disclosures for direct funding sources and financial relationships of guideline committee members, but not for relationships of the organization itself.
From these results, researchers concluded that financial relationships are not currently being properly disclosed, highlighting a need for more effective policies to manage organizational conflicts of interest and disclosure of financial relationships.
However, they did also note that their use of the National Guideline Clearinghouse as a single source of clinical practice guidelines and self-reported data from survey respondents may have limited the study.
