Prestigious Medical Journal Admits Violations of Conflict-of-interest Rulesby Terence Monmaney, Los Angeles Times |
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Thursday, February 24, 2000 The world's most influential medical journal has admitted to an extraordinary betrayal of its own ethics, saying that nearly half of the drug reviews published since 1997 were written by researchers with undisclosed financial support from companies marketing the drugs. The New England Journal of Medicine, in an internal probe published in today's edition, found that 19 out of about 40 drug-therapy reviews violated its tough conflict-of-interest policy. The policy bars researchers with pharmaceutical-firm ties from writing reviews or editorials about company products. Journal editors conducted the audit in response to reports last fall in the Los Angeles Times identifying eight drug-therapy articles that broke the journal's conflict-of-interest rules. The journal confirmed the findings and cited 11 additional articles that violated the policy. The authors of the 19 offending articles had disclosed their drug-company support to journal editors, who disregarded their own guidelines. "We regret our failure to apply our policy correctly," says the letter. It was signed by editor in chief Dr. Marcia Angell, deputy editor Dr. Robert Utiger and the editor of the drug-therapy reviews, Dr. Alastair Wood. |
"We were careless," Angell said in an interview. The editorial
staff now has "heightened vigilance" to the problem and has
implemented new disclosure policies to guard against it, she said.
The prestigious 188-year-old weekly had long positioned itself as a leading voice in medical ethics and had urged other publications to adopt standards as high as its own. The report raises questions about the quality of medical data in lesser journals. Most medical journals would not consider the violations identified by the New England Journal to be a problem. The ethical breach also shows the deep inroads that commercial sponsorship has made into academic research and publishing. "It's symptomatic of where the money comes from nowadays to do research in medicine," said Mildred Cho, a research scholar at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. Authors with a drug company's financial support are more inclined to be favorable toward its products, studies have shown. |
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