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. That supposed medical consensus benefited Wyeth, 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, 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.
The articles did not disclose Wyeth's role in initiating and paying
for the work. Elsevier, the publisher of some of the journals, said
it was disturbed by the allegations of ghostwriting and would
investigate.
The documents on ghostwriting were uncovered by lawyers suing Wyeth
and were made public after a request in court from PLoS Medicine, a
medical journal from the Public Library of Science, and The New York
Times.
A spokesman for Wyeth said that the articles were scientifically
accurate and that pharmaceutical companies routinely hired medical
writing companies to assist authors in drafting manuscripts.
More ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/health/research/05ghost.html?
_r=1&th&emc=th
