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People in India continued to enjoy one-click free access from January to April 2013 due to the largesse of the publishers, who ensured continuity in the availability of this valuable resource, since the ICMR had indicated willingness to continue this subscription. People in India have now had uninterrupted access to the full contents of The Cochrane Library since 2007, except for a brief period in 2010, when access was halted for nearly a month due to delays in renewal of the national license. Usage took a full six-month period to build up to what it was before free access was stopped. Fortunately, freedom to access reliable evidence to inform health decisions did not stop at midnight on March 31, 2013, as I had earlier feared would happen.
The
South Asian Cochrane Network and Centre thank the ICMR and Wiley-Blackwell for
working together to ensure that all people in India, with access to an internet
connection, will continue to have instant access to the resources provided by
The Cochrane Collaboration to ensure that all health decisions may be informed
by reliable evidence about what works, what does not work, what may harm, and
what interventions require further evidence to support their wide-spread use. I
am also personally grateful to the numerous people world-wide who wrote, or
called in, to express their support for this initiative; to the many
journalists who carried our concerns about a potential lapse in the renewal of
the national provision to people in different parts of the world; and to the group
of medical students in India who started an on-line petition to support the
ICMR-funded national provision. Thank you.
Freedom comes with obligations
National
free access to reliable evidence is a privilege afforded to people in a region
or country, where someone else has made this access possible. This privilege
has limited value if the evidence is not used. Millions of Indians, including
health professionals, are still unaware of the availability of this resource,
or of how to access it, or how to interpret the evidence in The Cochrane Library. It behooves those
of us who have enjoyed the fruits of this privilege to ensure that others in
need of evidence to guide decisions about their health, or the health of
others, who are unaware of this reliable source of evidence, also benefit from
this opportunity made available by this prudent investment by the ICMR.
For
instance, evidence from two Cochrane Review on the effects of long-term hormone replacement therapy in peri-menopausal and
postmenopausal women and on hormone therapy for preventing cardiovascular disease in
post-menopausal women found no evidence that HT provided any protective
effects against the development of heart disease, either in healthy women or
women with pre-existing heart disease. On the contrary, both single (oestrogen
alone) and combination HT (oestrogen plus progestogen) given to relatively
healthy post-menopausal women significantly increased the risk of stroke and venous
blood clots, and gall bladder disease; while combination HT, additionally,
significantly increased the risk of a heart attack or blood clots in the lungs
(pulmonary embolism), fatal or nonfatal heart attacks after one year's use,
stroke after three years' use, breast cancer, gallbladder disease, death from
lung cancer; and dementia in women over 65 years. Among women with existing
heart disease, combination HT significantly increased the risk of blood clots
in the leg veins and in the lungs. However, even today, many post-menopausal women
in India continue to be prescribed long-term HT by their physicians in the
misguided belief that this may be beneficial.
I urge the Federation of
Obstetrics and Gynaecologists in India (FOGSI) to work with their members, and
the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI), to ensure that appropriate steps
are taken to ensure that long term HT is not prescribed in this country to
unsuspecting women, since the dangers of its use surely merit immediate
preventive action at a national level.
Numerous
examples exist where Cochrane evidence indicates that health interventions that
are harmful or of little benefit are continuing to be used in India, while
interventions of little or uncertain benefit are prescribed, and others that
are likely to be beneficial are not used enough, or not at all; some of these
instances are due to best practice being sacrificed at the altar of
profit-based medicine, while others are due to sheer ignorance of the existence
of this evidence. Last year saw the inauguration of the The International Society for
Evidence-Based Health Care (ISEHC), as well as the Indian Chapter of the
ISEHC. We also now have an Indian Satellite of the Cochrane Public Health Review Group. Numerous Cochrane Reviews of importance to
public health in India exist that require dissemination; and the free national
access to The Cochrane Library is an opportunity
to ensure that the investment of the ICMR in providing access to reliable
evidence is utilized by these bodies and their members, in order to improve
health outcomes for the people of India.
Freedom also comes with responsibilities
Reliable evidence indicates that about
half of all clinical trials that have been conducted have never been published,
and trials with negative results about a treatment are more likely to be not
reported or selectively reported, so that adverse outcomes, and outcomes that
did not favour the investigators’ experimental drug, are never revealed, to the
detriment of people’s health. While the methods of the Cochrane Collaboration
are robust and can identify trials with outcomes at high risk of bias,
sometimes researchers and drug companies refuse to divulge data even when
requested. To ensure that Cochrane Evidence is based on all relevant data from
included studies, and not only what researchers wish for others to know, is a difficult
task that requires an international commitment to transparency in research as being
more important than the whims of researchers or their masters.
A
global campaign was launched to combat selective reporting and publication of
the results of trials. The All
Trials Campaign seeks world-wide support to ensure that all trials are registered
and their results reported in full. The Clinical Trials Registry-India (CTRI) has had some success
in ensuring that trials in India are prospectively registered before
recruitment of the first participant; but this is enforced only for industry
funded trials due to a directive from the DCGI. Prospective registration not
only helps prevent selective and distorted reporting of trial results but can
also improve their design and conduct, since the template for registration
in the CTRI facilitates the disclosure of methods that improve scientific
validity, and ethical conduct of trials. However, India has no mechanism in
place or on the anvil, to ensure that all trials are published in full, or for access
to data from these trials, should the need arise.
India can support this
world-wide effort in a number of ways. You can individually sign
the on-line petition. The ICMR can pledge support to this initiative and
join other
international organizations and agencies, and even national research
councils, such as the South African Medical Research Council, and student organization,
such as the American Medical Student Association, in committing to this
initiative. Ethics committees of universities, medical colleges, and clinical
establishments that undertake researchers can also sign the petition and ensure
that the goals of this campaign are fulfilled in their institutions. Medical
journal editors can serve as effective gate-keepers by ensuring that all trials
that they publish are prospectively registered, and that manuscripts of trials
submitted for publication provide access to full trial results, including raw
data, if required.
