Opps
More greedy pricks! From todays news.
All selling themselves cheap.
Why would you think these guys are opinion leaders?
Because you are ill informed.
Too farking bad.
These C*nts make The Emperors Club seem like virgins.
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Journal: Drug firm paid MDs for bylines
Merck denies studies were ghostwritten
By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff | April 16, 2008
Drug maker Merck & Co. manipulated public opinion on its blockbuster pain pill Vioxx by paying high-profile doctors to add their names to scientific reports drafted by others, according to a prominent medical journal.
Such ghostwriting is widely practiced by drug companies as part of their marketing efforts, the Journal of the American Medical Association said today, and some of the articles downplay the risk of drugs.
"This is a very serious transgression and the medical community needs to agree that it's wrong . . . and figure out a way to discourage it," said Dr. Joseph Ross, lead author of the study on ghostwriting and an instructor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
Merck took Vioxx off the market in 2004, after research revealed the drug increased patients' risk of heart attacks and strokes.
The ghostwriting study found that the former chief of cardiology at Tufts Medical Center was among dozens of prominent doctors whose names appear on research reports drafted by or for Merck. Although some of those doctors, including Tufts' Dr. Marvin Konstam, may have extensively edited or rewritten the documents before publication, other studies were printed with only minimal changes from the drafts.
A Merck legal spokesman said the company sometimes uses outside companies to draft articles that summarize research on its drugs. "That's a common evolving practice in the industry," said spokesman Kent Jarrell.
"We do not consider that ghostwriting," added Jim Fitzpatrick, lead counsel in Merck's defense against numerous lawsuits over Vioxx. He said the company expects that the person recruited to sign the article "would carefully review and make sure that the paper accurately reflected his or her scientific opinion."
Konstam, who is now senior adviser to the director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, defended his role in articles about the cardiovascular effects of Vioxx.
"I stand behind every publication of which I am an author," he said in a statement. "I had full access to the data analyzed in the publications. In addition, I have fully disclosed my relationships with Merck and other pharmaceutical or corporate entities as is appropriate and ethical."
Mount Sinai's Ross and his colleagues studied ghostwriting by Merck by using about 250 court records from suits filed against the company. Ross and his three coauthors all have served as consultants for the plaintiffs.
They found that for 16 of 20 early clinical trials on Vioxx conducted by Merck, the lead published author is an academic, although an internal document lists a Merck employee as writing a first draft.
"Putting someone as the first author is saying this is the person most responsible for the study, who did the analysis, interpreted the data, and wrote the paper," Ross said. "It gives the appearance of sound, more rigorously conducted science. It's just . . . wrong."
But a Merck official said the academic authors were "intimately involved in the studies."
The JAMA researchers also found evidence that Merck had hired companies to draft 72 scientific review articles, in one case paying a firm nearly $24,000 for a 20-page draft. Other documents show that Merck paid some doctors between $750 and $2,500 to publish the articles under their own names.
"People would get a near complete copy of the paper," Ross said. "They would make some mild edits - not changing the analysis or interpretation - and send them back."
When published, 50 of the 72 articles named only an academic researcher as author. Only half, including Konstam's, disclosed a financial relationship between Merck and the author.
A separate study, also published today in the journal, suggests that Merck minimized Vioxx's risks in articles on clinical trials involving patients with Alzheimer's disease. Merck denies that conclusion. Since 2004, Merck has been defending itself against allegations that it withheld or downplayed troubling data on the drug.
These studies "document how one company, Merck & Co. Inc., apparently manipulated dozens of publications to promote one of its own products," writes Dr. Catherine D. DeAngelis, JAMA editor in chief. "But make no mistake - the manipulation of study results, authors, editors, and reviewers is not the sole purview of one company."
A decade-old survey of six medical journals suggested that 13 percent of research articles were ghostwritten. Other studies have reported use of ghostwriting by individual drug companies, and several doctors have written critically about the practice after being asked to put their names on papers they did not write.
The content and authorship of medical articles is important because these articles typically influence decisions by doctors on what treatments to prescribe. Pharmaceutical company representatives also use the articles in direct marketing to doctors.
"It raises questions about the integrity of the industry and academic physicians who sign their names to things they don't do," said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
"If the information is biased, patients may be getting the wrong medication, or medication that's harmful, or medication that they don't necessarily need," he added. "Not only should patients worry, but the pharmaceutical industry should worry because the industry is already one of the least trusted."
The practice of ghostwriting can serve the financial interests of both doctors and drug companies. In addition to honorarium for assuming authorship, the doctors can accumulate publications that may be used to judge their professional success.
For drug companies, the prominent doctor's name on a paper may help get the article published in a more prestigious journal and may lead other doctors to pay more attention to the contents.
To guard against the problem, many medical journals have adopted policies defining authorship as making a substantial contribution to the content. Merck adopted similar guidelines in 2003.
In her editorial in JAMA, DeAngelis suggested additional steps, including disciplining doctors who claim work that isn't theirs and banning them from publishing future work. She also said journals should require an independent statistical analysis of clinical data, as JAMA already does.
Alice Dembner can be reached at Dembner@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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