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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4351264,00.html
>
> }}}>Begin
> Scandal of scientists who take money for papers
> ghostwritten by drug
> companies
>
> Doctors named as authors may not have seen raw data
>
> Sarah Boseley, health editor
> Thursday February 7, 2002
> The Guardian
>
> Scientists are accepting large sums of money from
> drug companies to
> put their names to articles endorsing new medicines
> that they have
> not written - a growing practice that some fear is
> putting scientific
> integrity in jeopardy.
>
> Ghostwriting has become widespread in such areas of
> medicine as
> cardiology and psychiatry, where drugs play a major
> role in
> treatment. Senior doctors, inevitably very busy,
> have become willing
> to "author" papers written for them by ghostwriters
> paid by drug
> companies.
>
> Originally, ghostwriting was confined to medical
> journal supplements sponsored by the industry, but
> it can now be found in all the major journals in
> relevant fields. In some cases, it is alleged, the
> scientists named as a
> uthors will not have seen the raw data they are
> writing about - just tables compiled by company
> employees.
>
> The doctors, who may also give a talk based on the
> paper to an audience of other doctors at a drug
> company- sponsored symposium, receive substantial
> sums of money. Fuller Torrey, executive director of
> the Stanley Foundati
> on Research Programmes in Bethesda, Maryland, found
> in a survey that British psychiatrists were being
> paid around $2,000 (£1,400) a time for symposium
> talks, plus airfares and hotel accommodation, while
> Americans got abou
> t $3,000. Some payments ran as high as $5,000 or
> $10,000.
>
> "Some of us believe that the present system is
> approaching a high-class form of professional
> prostitution," he said.
>
> Robin Murray, head of the division of psychological
> medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry in London,
> is one of those who has become increasingly
> concerned. "It is clear that we have a situation
> where, when an audience i
> s listening to a well-known British psychiatrist,
> you recognise the stage where the audience is
> uncertain as to whether the psychiatrist really
> believes this or is saying it because they them
> selves or their department is
> getting some financial reward," he said.
>
> "I can think of a well-known British psychiatrist I
> met and I said, 'How are you?' He said, 'What day is
> it? I'm just working out what drug I'm supporting
> today.'"
>
> Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England
> Journal of Medicine, wrote a year ago that when she
> ran a paper on antidepressant drug treatment, the
> authors' financial ties to the manufacturers - which
> the journal requir
> es all contributors to declare - were so extensive
> that she had to run them on the website. She decided
> to commission an editorial about it and spoke to
> research psychiatrists, but "we found very few who
> did not have fina
> ncial ties to drug companies that make
> antidepressants."
>
> She wrote: "Researchers serve as consultants to
> companies whose products they are studying, join
> advisory boards and speakers' bureaus, enter into
> patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be the
> listed authors of article
> s ghostwritten by interested companies, promote
> drugs and devices at company-sponsored symposiums,
> and allow themselves to be plied with expensive
> gifts and trips to luxurious settings. Many also
> have equity interest in t
> he companies."
>
> In September her journal joined the Lancet and 11
> others in denouncing the drug companies for imposing
> restrictions on the data to which scientists are
> given access in the clinical trials they fund. Some
> of the journals p
> ropose to demand a signed declaration that the
> papers scientists submit are their own.
>
> The success of Prozac, the antidepressant which
> became a cult "happy" drug in the 1990s,
> substantially raised the stakes in psychiatry. Its
> promotion coincided with the decline of state
> funding for research, leaving scien
> tists in all areas of medicine dependent on
> pharmaceutical companies to fund or commission their
> work. That in turn gave the industry unprecedented
> control over data and ended with research papers
> increasingly being draft
> ed by company employees or commercial agencies.
>
> The responsibility of scientists for the content of
> their papers takes on serious significance in the
> context of court cases in the US, where relatives of
> people who killed themselves and murdered others
> while on SSRIs (s
> elective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) - the class
> of drug to which Prozac belongs - claimed the drugs
> were responsible. According to David Healy, a north
> Wales-based psychopharmacologist who has given
> evidence for the f
> amilies, the companies have relied on articles
> apparently authored by scientists who may in fact
> have not seen the raw data.
>
> Dr Healy, who had unprecedented access to the data
> that the companies keep in their archives, said: "It
> may well be that 50% of the articles on drugs in the
> major journals across all areas of medicine are not
> written in a
> way that the average person in the street expects
> them to be authored."
>
> He cites the case brought last year against the
> former SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) by
> relatives of Donald Schell. The court found that the
> company's best-selling antidepressant, an SSRI
> called Seroxat, had ca
> used Schell to murder his wife, daughter and
> granddaughter and commit suicide.
>
> The company's defence was based on scientific papers
> which analysed the results of trials comparing
> Seroxat with a placebo and found there was no
> increased risk of suicide for depressed people on
> Seroxat. But the raw data
> probably does not support that, argues Dr Healy.
> Some of the placebo suicides took place while
> patients were withdrawing from an older drug. When
> the figures are readjusted without these, he says,
> they show there is subs
> tantially increased risk of suicide on Seroxat.
>
> This raises the question of whether the eminent
> scientists whose names were on the papers ever saw
> the raw data from the trials - or saw only tables
> compiled by company employees, he says. David
> Dunner, a professor at the
> University of Washington, who co-authored one of
> the papers in 1995, admits he did not see the raw
> data. "I don't know who saw it. I did not," he said.
> "My role in the paper was that the data were
> presented to us and we
> analysed it and wrote it up and wrote references."
>
> His co-author Stuart Montgomery, then of St Mary's
> hospital medical
> school in London, declined to answer calls and
> emails from the
> Guardian. The third name on the paper is that of
> Geoff Dunbar, a
> company employee.
>
> The World Health Organisation has expressed concern
> about the ties
> between industry and researchers. Jonathan Quick,
> director of
> essential drugs and medicines policy, wrote in the
> latest WHO
> Bulletin: "If clinical trials become a commercial
> venture in which
> self-interest overrules public interest and desire
> overrules science,
> then the social contract which allows research on
> human subjects in
> return for medical advances is broken."
>
> Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
> 2002
> End<{{{

=====
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