Healthy Skepticism Library item: 5636

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Publication type: news

Our Conflicted Medical Journals
New York Times 2006 Jul 23
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/opinion/23sun2.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Full text:

THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 23, 2006
Editorial

Our Conflicted Medical Journals

Leading medical journals seem to be having a difficult time disentangling
themselves from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. If they
cannot stop printing articles by scientists with close ties to these
businesses, they should at least force the authors to disclose their
conflicts of interest publicly so that doctors and patients are forewarned
that the interpretations may be biased.

Two disturbing cases were described in detail by The Wall Street Journal in
recent weeks. One involved The Journal of the American Medical Association,
or JAMA; the other an obscure journal known as Neuropsychopharmacology,
which is published by a leading professional society in the field.

The article in JAMA must surely have pleased all makers of antidepressant
drugs. It warned pregnant women that if they stopped taking antidepressant
medication they would increase their risk of falling back into depression.
Hidden from view was the fact that most of the 13 authors had been paid as
consultants or lecturers by the makers of antidepressants. Their financial
ties were not disclosed to JAMA on the preposterous grounds that the authors
did not deem them relevant.

An even more egregious set of events occurred at Neuropsychopharmacology,
which recently published a favorable assessment of a controversial new
treatment for depression resistant to conventional therapies. Left
unmentioned was that eight of the nine authors serve as consultants to the
company that makes the device used in the therapy. The ninth works directly
for the company. Just to make things particularly incestuous, the lead
author of the study is the journal’s editor and a consultant to the company.
He has been accused in the past of promoting therapies in which he had a
financial stake.

It is hard to know whether to be more upset at the journal’s failure to
disclose these ties or at its decision to let such interested parties serve
as authors in the first place. Early drafts of the article were prepared by
a professional writer hired by the company. With all those ingredients
coalescing, it is no wonder that the new therapy was judged “a promising and
well-tolerated intervention” for treatment-resistant depression.

Many journals have been tightening their disclosure and publication policies
in recent years, and both JAMA and Neuropsychopharmacology plan further
tightening. But the reforms are not likely to go far enough. It seems
imperative that more muscle be put into forcing disclosure and publication
of conflicts of interest. If all leading journals agreed to punish authors
who fail to reveal their conflicts by refusing to accept further manuscripts
from them, a lot more authors would be inclined to fess up. Better yet,
journals should try much harder to find authors free of conflicts. That is
the best hope for retaining credibility with doctors and the public.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company