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Doctors Paid To Sign ’ghost-written’ ReportsA LEADING drug maker manipulated public opinion on its painkiller Vioxx by paying high-profile doctors to add their names to scientific reports drafted by others, a medical journal says. The Journal of the American Medical Association said such ghostwriting was widely practised by drug companies as part of their marketing efforts, and some of the articles played down the risk of drugs. "This is a very serious transgression and the medical community needs to agree that its wrong," said Dr Joseph Ross, lead author of the study on ghostwriting and an instructor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. The Merck company took Vioxx off the market in 2004 after research revealed it increased patients risk of heart attacks and strokes. Last year it agreed to a $US4.85 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits filed by former Vioxx users or their families. The ghostwriting study found that the former chief of cardiology at Tufts Medical Centre 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 used outside companies to draft articles that summarised research on its drugs. "Thats a common evolving practice in the industry," said spokesman Kent Jarrell. "We do not consider that ghostwriting," added Jim Fitzpatrick, lead counsel in Mercks defence against the Vioxx lawsuits. He said the company expected that the person recruited to sign the article "would carefully review and make sure that the paper accurately reflected his or her scientific opinion". Dr 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. Dr Ross and his colleagues studied ghostwriting by Merck by using about 250 court records from suits filed against the company. He and his three co-authors 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 was 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," Dr Ross said. "It gives the appearance of sound, more rigorously conducted science. Its just … wrong." But a Merck official said the academic authors were "intimately involved in the studies". The journals researchers also found evidence that Merck had hired companies to draft 72 scientific review articles, in one case paying a firm almost $US24,000 for a 20-page draft. Other documents show that Merck paid some doctors between $US750 and $US2500 to publish the articles under their own names. BOSTON GLOBE Tag CloudExternal InformationAdditional InformationSafeway Restricts Purchases of Chilean Salmon...Abe resigns after year of scandal... Time magazine ordered to pay Suharto $106m$... America’s Pastime Is Only a Blip in Soccer-Crazed Brazil... Where Am I?News Main Page - Business - Doctors Paid To Sign ’ghost-written’ Reports |
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