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December 21, 2004
Holy NSAIDS! Now it's naproxen that will kill you?
First it was Vioxx and Bextra, then Celebrex, and now it turns out that Naproxen increases the risk of heart problems.My take: Why are all of these announcements happening all at the same time? These studies have an enormous lead time, so it's not like they were started in response to the Vioxx problems. These studies were mostly intended to answer other questions (the naproxen one was for Alzheimers) so I'm guessing that the researchers unblinded them early to investigate the cardiac issue. That raises the issue of positive-outcome bias: how many researchers studying the effect of NSAIDs on X unblinded their studies and didn't find any negative effects?
Posted by ekr at December 21, 2004 8:34 AM | Filed under: