Wyeth hired ghostwriters to push HRT

Once again, a class action lawsuit has served to unveil the extent of ghostwriting in top medical journals.

In a story published this morning in the New York Times, drug giant Wyeth was found to have paid for more than two-doxen articles favourable to hormone replacement therapy over a seven-year period. For almost half that time, HRT was coming under scrutiny as independent tests linked the controversial treatment to breast cancer, hear disease and stroke.

Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a 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.

The court documents provide a detailed paper trail showing how Wyeth contracted with a medical communications company to outline articles, draft them and then solicit top physicians to sign their names, even though many of the doctors contributed little or no writing. The documents suggest the practice went well beyond the case of Wyeth and hormone therapy, involving numerous drugs from other pharmaceutical companies.

The company hired to write the studies, as well as one of the academics credited for writing one of them, stood by the work.

In response to a query from a reporter, Michael Platt, the president of DesignWrite, wrote that the company “has not, and will not, participate in the publication of any material in which it does not have complete confidence in the scientific validity of the content, based upon the best available data.” 

The problem is, even if the science itself is not damaged by the connection to the company benefitting from it, its credibility can be. 
 

Comments

[Free book]

Nice share. It enlightening me.
Thank you

[Sara]

This is just the tip of a very big iceberg

[terryb]

Illness is something which lands on a person suddenly and scares them. They turn to their wallets to try to save themselves. Drug companies are there waiting. Positioned so well to take desperate people's money, they themselves spend lots on making themselves seem credible. Funny how business uses out-and-out lies to become credible... Solution? Get back to the root of things and think before we jeopardize our health. We don't want to get involved with the likes of panderers and hucksters. It's a gamble.

[Jeffrey Dach MD]

A 112 million dollar punitive award indicates outrage by the "wanton and reckless” conduct by Wyeth. This is the tip of the iceberg, as another ten thousand cases are waiting for their day in court.

Women's Health Initiative Bombshell

Seven years ago, a bombshell appeared in the medical literature, and massive numbers of women switched from Prempro to safer bio-identical hormones. This was the 2002 WHI study which showed that PremPro causes breast cancer. This massive shift away from synthetic Prempro reduced breast cancer rates to 10,000 fewer cases per year. (NEJM Volume 356:1670-1674 April 19, 2007 Number 16)

For More:
http://jeffreydach.com/2009/11/27/synthetic-hormones-pfizerwyeth-lose-big-court-case-by-jeffrey-dach-md.aspx

Jeffrey Dach MD