Thus, it is commonly said that the more resources devoted to research in a given country, the more progress its citizens will enjoy. Simplification that allows us, through elementary comparisons of the share of GDP devoted to research and from some of the international indicators of human development, to deduce that more research equals more progress, a finding that leads us to demand greater investment in it.
Without questioning the indicative value of this approach, perhaps it might be useful to complement the argumentation by adding considerations on the quality of the investigations that are carried out both in the basic field and in the applied clinic. Quality that may have to do with the relevance of the projects, with the suitability of the procedures or with the usefulness of the results, in the short, medium and long term, of course.
It’s been a while since the potential waste associated with research deserves attention from investors, administrations and even researchers. An issue to which the SESPAS ethics working group and the Grífols Foundation dedicated one of their annual meetings.
|
“The bad investigation wastes a good amount of economic resources, which is estimated between 730 million and almost eight billion pounds sterling” |
A problem that is not exhausted in the development of projects that, due to their lack of originality, will hardly provide a significant increase in knowledge or practical innovations. Because it is not uncommon for published research whose design is particularly exposed to bias, as highlighted in the recent article by Stefanie Pirosca (from the University of Aberdeen) and collaborators, on the scandal of tolerating bad health research.
This is a selection of articles reviewed between May 2020 and April 2021. The data analyzed corresponds to 1,659 projects from 84 countries, which were assessed by 546 reviewers from 49 Clinical Review Groups of the Cochrane Collaboration. The article highlights that of the 1,640 trials that provided information on the risk of bias, 1,013 –that is, two thirds– they were exposed to high risk of bias and in only 133 cases — 8% — the risk of bias was low. No clinical area is highlighted -in particular- and no country was exempt. Of the 29 Spanish projects included, 27 were, according to this criterion, bad.
In the best casepoor research squanders a fair amount of financial resources, which the authors of this review estimate to be between £730 million and nearly £8 billion (850 to 9,500 million euros) and that does not compensate for the involvement of hundreds of thousands of experimental subjects (220,000 of them enrolled in bad projects) and that, moreover, can give rise to hasty or erroneous decisions, with the corresponding risk of iatrogenic generation.
So the challenge it is not simply to increase investment in research but to do it well. As in so many other areas of life, including disease prevention and/or protection and promotion of community health.
