Who is really behind the articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine? A review by the Washington Post attempted to find out, and they decided to assess each study s funding sources to get an idea.
The Post, aided by former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell, discovered that over the period of a year the journal published 73 articles on original studies of new drugs. Of those, 60 were funded by a pharmaceutical company, 50 were co-written by drug company employees and 37 had lead authors who were receiving compensation in some form by a drug company. This seems to be the new normal, as drug companies are now playing an increasing role in providing money for research.
According to the authors, this system can potentially create significant bias in the evaluation of research done to promote a new drug. They cite the cases of the diabetes drug Avandia, marketed by GlaxoSmithKline, and Merck s withdrawn arthritis drug, Vioxx, as specific instances (albeit not from their survey interval) where drug industry forces may have compromised academic integrity in drug research.
ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross took issue with the underlying premise of the Post and Dr. Angell s perspective. Just because the pharmaceutical industry funds, partially funds, or one of a study s co-authors once worked with a drug company, does not justify the conclusion that therefore drug research is corrupt.
Another point made in the article is that, according to a recent survey, doctors are just half as willing to prescribe a drug that was tested in an industry-funded trial, as compared to a study done by academics or government. I d like to see how that survey was worded, added Dr. Ross.
ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom believes that if there was an intentional effort to conceal data on problems with Avandia, Glaxo executives should go to jail. Fine, there were some abuses, there always have been, but critics always focus on the two very bad cases, Avandia and Vioxx, and ignore the game-changing innovations, such as drugs for HIV, hepatitis C, cancer, and heart disease. These advances greatly outweigh any abuses that have taken place, yet we never hear about this side of the story.
