As hot new drug classes are rushed to market and net
billions in a few years only to crash and burn from undisclosed risks and
lawsuits (think: SSRI antidepressants, atypical antipsychotics, long acting
beta agonist asthma drugs (LABAs) and antiepileptic drugs) some blame journals
for publishing marketing disguised as science and serving as de facto medical
stenographers. In addition to ad sales, journals can earn hundreds of thousands
of dollars from reprints of articles that the drug companies want to
disseminate.
Under criticism, medical and scientific journals have tried
to improve their disclosure of authors' financial links to industry--but not
too hard. Often the disclosures are
relegated to a barely readable paragraph linking authors identified by initials
not names to 60 or more drug companies. Worse, the disclosures don't appear in
abstract databases like PubMed but are hidden behind a financial firewall
available only to paid subscribers who have access to the full articles.
But planting drug industry-funded papers that extol new
drugs or smooth over safety concerns is too lucrative for journals or drug
companies to quit. The latest case is TNF (tumor necrosis factor) blocker drugs
such as Humira, Remicide, Enbrel and Cimzia which are the drug industry's new
profit center now that so many blockbuster pills have gone off patent.
The conditions such biologic drugs treat--rheumatoid
arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis and plaque
psoriasis--are rare but drug companies now call them underdiagnosed and offer
quizzes to help patients self diagnose. Watch out. Worse, papers written by
drug industry-funded authors are appearing in journals to minimize the many
dangerous side effects that accompany TNF blockers because they suppress the
immune system. Recently research by drug industry-funded authors has appeared
in medical journals to dispel data linking TNF blockers to increasing incidences
of hospitalizations,
malignancies, [v]
cardiovascular
events and Herpes
zoster. Looks like another publication plan. END
Martha Rosenberg's newly published book, Born
with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health
(Prometheus 2012) has been praised by PLOS Medicine and the medical community.
[i] 1998 Dec; 7(10): 1231-46
[ii] 2000 Aug; 14-28; 160(15): 2263-72
[iii] 2002 Sep 23;162(17):1934-42?
[v] Maria Suarez-Almazor has received speaker fees from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Roche and consultant fees from Amgen
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