Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18286

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Silverman E
Grassley Urges NIH To Focus On Ghostwriting
Pharmalot 2010 Jun 28
http://www.pharmalot.com/2010/06/grassley-urges-nih-to-focus-on-ghostwriting/

Notes:

Link to the report http://grassley.senate.gov/about/upload/Senator-Grassley-Report.pdf

Full text:

As the National Institutes of Health readies new conflict of interest rules governing interactions between academic researchers and drugmakers, US Senator Chuck Grassley has released a report he believes should convince the agency to incorpoate a tougher stance toward ghostwriting in its forthcoming policy. At issue is the notion that ghostwritten articles unfairly influence physicians and their approach to practicing medicine.
“The NIH ought to ensure that the final rule defines the term ’significant financial interest’ to include pharmaceutical and device company financing and/or other material contribution or support to develop medical literature, including but not limited to conceiving and designing the underlying paper, collecting and/or analyzing the data, and drafting, reviewing and/or revising the manuscript,” Grassley wrote in a June 24 letter to NIH director Francis Collins.
His report, which includes some author contracts and emails (see page 18 of the report for the email depicted below), finds the role drugmakers play in medical publications remains veiled or undisclosed; only some med schools explicitly prohibit ghostwriting in their policies (see this); detection of ghostwriting by med schools is limited; strengthening journal authorship policies appears to have limited effect on ghostwriting and disclosure of industry financing of medical articles, and the NIH does not have explicit policies on disclosure of industry financing of ghostwritten articles. UPDATE: PhRMA writes to remind us of its principles of conduct.
Last year, Grassley wrote to eight major medical journals and ten leading medical schools asking them to describe their policies on ghostwriting (back story). He also asked two large drugmakers about allegations they hired ghostwriters to draft articles promoting their meds and solicited academics to become primary authors (background here, here and here).
Ghost from Flickr Creative Commons mattwi1s0n