The positive side of negative news (AHA Scientific Sessions 2005)

Developments from this meeting underscored the importance of getting to the bottom of clinical questions.

By Peggy Peck, AMNews correspondent. Dec. 19, 2005.

Reports from conferences important to physicians

In recent years, scientific meetings and professional journals have been pilloried for emphasizing the positive while giving short shrift to the negative, but the American Heart Assn. turned that notion on its head at its 2005 Scientific Sessions held Nov. 13-16 in Dallas.

From the first plenary to the final late-breaking abstracts session, the news was negative and the truth unvarnished, as again and again trials reported null or marginal results.

Timothy Gardner, MD, a thoracic surgeon and AHA program committee chair, said the newfound willingness to prominently report negative findings is an important feature of scientific meetings. In the past, many "negative trials never made it to the light of day, which left clinicians and patients without [this] knowledge. I think it is important to report when a treatment has failed."

On balance, most studies that were reported at late-breaking clinical trials sessions had null results, but three offered dramatic illustrations of this point: PREVENT IV, IDEAL, and FIELD. The first two were also published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, while the third was published online in The Lancet.

PREVENT IV, Project of Ex-vivo Vein Graft Engineering via Transfection, investigated a promising experimental compound, edifoligide, and a novel procedure, pretreatment of saphenous veins before grafting.

The drug was touted as a genetic "decoy" designed to attract E2F, a transcription factor that triggers neointimal hyperplasia. The decoy action would, researchers thought, block the natural activity of E2F, which, if effective, would reduce neointimal hyperplasia.