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Shall I compare thee to another drug?

Cross posted from Nature Medicine’s Spoonful of Medicine blog on behalf of Meera Swami

In 2009, the US Congress pledged $1.1 billion to improve comparative effectiveness research, a field dedicated to side-by-side evaluations of how drugs perform. The key question is whether new medicines really offer any improvements over the current standard of care at their time of approval. Without this information, are clinicians equipped to make the best treatment decisions?

Such concerns are reinforced by a study published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that over the past decade approximately half of the new drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not have publically available information on their comparative effectiveness when they were approved.

Read the rest of this post on Spoonful of Medicine.

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