WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MDOUGM
Last month, medical professor Daniel Coyne of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis discussed the outcomes of a clinical trial that aimed to compare different treatment regimens for epoetin alfa, a drug often used to stimulate blood production in dialysis patients who suffer from anemia, which is characterized by a below-normal red blood cell count. The Normal Hematocrit Trial (NHT) was conducted in the mid-1990s by researchers at Amgen, the biotechnology company that manufactures epoetin alfa under the name-brand EPOGEN, and collaborating nephrologists.
After completing his own analysis of the trial data, which he obtained this March through a Freedom of Information Act request, Coyne claimed to have generated results that were “dramatically different” from those of our original report, published in the ...
