Posted on 07/12/2006 10:34:19 AM PDT by neverdem
Despite a Chicago-based national medical journal's efforts to require contributing doctors to disclose their ties to the pharmaceutical industry, physicians don't always abide by the rules--even during a period of intense scrutiny of drugmaker-doctor relationships.
In Wednesday's weekly edition the Journal of the American Medical Association is expected to issue a correction on a February article it published about a major depression study.
"Most of the 13 authors" failed to disclose they were paid consultants to drugmakers, according to a Wall Street Journal article Tuesday.
The study warned about risks of relapsing into depression for pregnant women who stop taking prescribed antidepressants. The article arrived at a good time for makers of antidepressants, who had been under recent scrutiny about the safety of their medications when used during pregnancy, the newspaper reported.
Doctors have been under fire for allegedly allowing drug company gifts and payments to cloud their judgment when writing purportedly unbiased articles that could influence physicians' prescribing practices.
The story beat by a day the medical journal's plan to disclose a letter from the authors regarding the conflicts. Chicago-based JAMA said it had planned for weeks to disclose the ties of the doctors, who included Dr. Lee Cohen, Harvard University professor and director of the perinatal and reproductive psychiatry research program at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The story, and the ability of doctors to get their work published despite non-compliance with disclosure policies, riled consumer groups Tuesday, stoking their desires for disclosure guidelines with teeth.
One such group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said researchers who do not disclose their ties to industry should be banned for at least three years from publishing in the affected medical journal.
"The only solution is for journals to adopt strong penalties for authors who fail to disclose," the Center...
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
The best penalty the Journal could impose is no more published articles for at least one year by the offending physicians. That would solve the problem. These arrogant doctors feel they must publish for recognition or perish.
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