Medical Papers by Ghostwriters Pushed Therapy

["Hamaker, Charles" <cahamake@uncc.edu>]

Medical Papers by Ghostwriters Pushed Therapy

By NATASHA SINGER

Published: August 4, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/health/research/05ghost.html?_r=1&hp

Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a 
pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 
scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy 
in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence 
on medical literature is broader than previously known.

The articles, published in medical journals between 1998 and 
2005, emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of 
taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, 
heart disease and dementia 
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/dementia/overview.html? 
inline=nyt-classifier> . That supposed medical consensus 
benefited Wyeth 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/wyeth/index.html? 
inline=nyt-org> , the pharmaceutical company that paid a medical 
communications firm to draft the papers, as sales of its hormone 
drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion 
in 2001.

But the seeming consensus fell apart in 2002 when a huge federal 
study on hormone therapy was stopped after researchers found that 
menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk 
of invasive breast cancer 
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/breast-cancer/overview. 
html?inline=nyt-classifier> , heart disease and stroke. A later 
study found that hormones increased the risk of dementia in older 
patients.

The ghostwritten papers were typically review articles, in which 
an author weighs a large body of medical research and offers a 
bottom-line judgment about how to treat a particular ailment. The 
articles appeared in 18 medical journals, including The American 
Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International 
Journal of Cardiology.

snip

As medical journals learn more about ghostwriting through 
documents released in lawsuits and in Congress, some editors have 
started asking authors harder questions. A few leading journals, 
like The Journal of the American Medical Association, have 
instituted authorship forms that require contributors to detail 
their role in an article and to disclose conflicts of interest.

But many journals have yet to take such steps.

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