{"id":1824,"date":"2026-04-16T08:10:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T08:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/2026\/04\/16\/meeting-abstracts-are-they-a-load-of-old-biased-cobblers\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T08:10:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T08:10:00","slug":"meeting-abstracts-are-they-a-load-of-old-biased-cobblers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/2026\/04\/16\/meeting-abstracts-are-they-a-load-of-old-biased-cobblers\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Abstracts are they a load of old biased cobblers?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n

This paper is perhaps interesting as we go into AAN week…All that will surface for the masses is the Conference abstract. For AAN they will all be published in the Journal Neurology, just as ECTRIMS abstracts are published in the Multiple Sclerosis Journal. The question here is whether abstracts published in meetings are biased compaired to what is published after it has been peer reviewed.<\/p>\n

They conclude that there are changes between the abstracts of papers and the impact and I have to say NSS. This is just drivel. Without doing one ounce of work there have been many things that one can say about meeting abstracts and full papers, but first things first the breadth of review is week. They examine studies from many different diseases one of which is multiple sclerosis but there are hundreds of abstracts coming from meetings that lead to published trial papers. <\/p>\n

First things first not all abstracts see the light of day. Abstracts are now a passport for pharma to schlep neuros to meetings as now they have to present to get a free-ticket whereas historically pharma just paid for the gravy train. When the work is peer reviewed the referees may realise that ideas are fundementally flawed, they can make the authors do more work or they can dump it on the maggot pile as not being good enough. However, pharma trials tend to have abstraacts written by professional writers as are the papers. Neuros are stuck on the author list as a marketing tool and may do abit of editing of what has been written. It is easy to see at meeting those done by academics tend to have university logos and are all over the place whereas pharma make the presentations (slides\/posters) and so they are themed and similar such as the use of colours and fonts. Pharma used abstracts to give a sneak-peak to what is coming in the full paper and the content of many abstract content may form the basis of one peer-reviewed paper. Because pharma have to publish to standards that regulate the industry, hence they are dull and matter of fact without too much controversy. They are giving the Scientific World a peak of what they have already told investors as it is imperative to limit insider dealling and so they would risk it being leaked by people within the meeting structure before the investors have been told. Most abstracts are boring because they say the results will be presented at the weeking as they don’t want to release the result before they publish the work…Although at ECTRIMS the requirement is that the research is unpublished there are certain big academic groups, often American Groups that do not talk about their results until they are published, in case they get pipped to the discovery, so often you know the work before it is event presented at the meeting and as they only have a few minutes to present it, it is less than the paper. Some academics go out on a limb and tell you unpublished data sometimes you see the same stuff over and over again until it surfaces months or years later. However academic often are not reporting trials. What is evident is that pharma dump trial data in meetings abstracts so that it is in the public domain so they can talk about it but when the content is something that is not information they want to spread they dump it in a meeting and never publish the data. We realised this about anti-drug antibodies as companies did not want to draw attention to stuff that people might not like, but to be transparent they put it in the public domain is a medium that is typically not searchable, so data can be hidden. I have used abstracts to then know what to hunt for and have published the take home messages and made people aware…the best example was the fact that anti-CD20 was going to stop the COVID-19 vaccine from working. We knew about the result because it was in an abstract published years earlier…why wasn’t it published? Rule number one of pharma club is don’t diss your own product. This information was important to know as it was going to be a safety issue we found the data tucked away in clinical trials.gov. I got a student who was stuck at home due to lock down, to extract the data as part of their lab project and got them to write it up. I wrote to the Neuro from the abstract asking them if they were going to publish the data…it was never their call because the company decides what to publish and they had sat on it for years and they didn’t respond…so we stuck it on MedrXive a non-per reveiwed source with a month of the COVID out break and published it…..Snooze you lose but it was a safety issue. The work got hundreds of citations before pharma woke-up published their own work and ignored the fact that we had published and interpreted the result months earlier…. We got a nice email from a Health Care professional who read the blog and our intrepretation of COVID-19 related information and decided on extended interval dosing of their MS drug and they got vaccinated on the very first day the public was offered vaccination…They made an antibody response to the COVID-19 vaccine and so got more protection from vaccination than they might have got. That was science in action. That was enthusing students in science.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Kenny RPW, Twentyman K, Craig D, Meader N, Norman G. The Impact on Systematic Reviews of Risk of Bias Assessment Changes From Conference Abstracts to Full Text. Cochrane Evid Synth Methods. 2026 Mar 27;4(3):e70078. doi: 10.1002\/cesm.70078. PMID: 41982821; PMCID: PMC13073319.<\/p>\n

Conference abstracts are commonly included in systematic reviews of evidence. Due to limitations in word count, conference abstracts often lack data or information. This causes issues for the assessment of risk of bias (RoB). We therefore aimed to compare the RoB rating, using the Cochrane RoB tool, for abstracts and full texts. This was accomplished using previously published Cochrane reviews and comparing RoB ratings for included studies originally included as an abstract and later as full text. To accomplish this, we searched the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews for reviews with updates across numerous disciplines (depression, anxiety, surgical, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and musculoskeletal disease). We identified 29 reviews, with 52 randomized controlled trials included, which had an abstract and subsequent full text available. If abstracts and full texts were not assessed using the Cochrane RoB tool, we obtained the texts and performed the assessment (n<\/em>\u00a0= 32). To assess the likelihood of changing the domain assessment rating (low, unclear, or high) from conference abstract to full text, we performed a Bayesian categorical multinomial model for each domain (i.e., signaling question) of the Cochrane tool. At the abstract assessment stage, the most common decision was unclear. Using unclear as the reference level in the model led to increased odds of being rated high at full text, compared to abstract assessment, for domains 2 (allocation concealment: odds ratio [OR] = 3.09, 95% credible intervals (CrI) 1.01 to 9.84) and 3 (blinding: OR = 5.09, 95% CrI 1.67 to 16.20). Domain 2 also had odds of being rated low (OR: 2.93, 95% CrI: 1.13 to 7.87). This suggests an impact of changing conference abstract to full text assessments on RoB. The numerous unclear ratings observed at the abstract assessment were usually due to a lack of reporting<\/strong>. While the findings of this study should be interpreted within the context of small numbers, the evidence still suggests that, in some instances, such as allocation concealment and blinding, it is likely that the decision could change based on full-text assessment. This also has implications for the certainty of the evidence, which is impacted by the RoB assessments, with having abstracts only or full texts available potentially changing the overall certainty. Current RoB tools may not be suitable for assessing conference abstracts.<\/p>\n

Source: multiple-sclerosis-research.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tweet This paper is perhaps interesting as we go into AAN week…All that will surface for the masses is the Conference abstract. For AAN they will all be published in the Journal Neurology, just as ECTRIMS abstracts are published in the Multiple Sclerosis Journal. The question here is whether abstracts published in meetings are biased…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[11,15,9,8,13,14,12,10],"class_list":["post-1824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiple-sclerosis-research","tag-brain-repair","tag-marburg-type-ms","tag-ms","tag-multiple-sclerosis","tag-myelin","tag-neuroregeneration","tag-oligodendrocyte","tag-remyelination"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wickedsister.evit.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}