JAMA says it was misled by researchers

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CHICAGO (AP) -- For the second time in two months, the Journal of the American Medical Association says it was misled by researchers who failed to reveal financial ties to drug companies.

Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former New England Journal of Medicine editor and an outspoken critic of doctors' conflicts of interest, said it would be impossible for medical journals to reject all research with industry ties.

If industry ties were an obstacle to getting research published, "you'd have no research on drugs," Kassirer said.

Still, industry-funded drug research tends to have more favorable results than other studies, and those ties need to be revealed so readers can have "a healthy skepticism," he said.

The New England Journal of Medicine also requires financial disclosures from authors, although not before accepting an article for publication as JAMA is now doing, said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, the journal's editor.

Okay, three separate issues here for me:

(1) In all reality, for a researcher to become an "expert" on a drug they have to conduct extensive trials on the drug at hand, and those trials are usually paid for by the Big Pharma companies and/or the Government.

Now that the researcher is considered an expert on the drug because of months or years of experience in clinical trials, he/she wants to publish their written research about the drug in peer reviewed journals.

He/she publishes their materials in one of the journals and is then questioned for having ties to Big Pharma or the Government when those two entities are usually the only ones to foot the bill for the research.

Isn't this a catch-22?

(2) In today's law suit happy world, why wouldn't a researcher disclose their financial or professional ties with Big Pharma or the Government? I realize that the pharmaceutical world is not that large so the groups of researchers may know who is funding another group of researchers, but that doesn't help the lay person have prior knowledge of it.

If it "isn't that big of a deal" in the researching community as I have not read any articles from the medical community expressing outrage over it, then why would they not go ahead and report it?

(3) Here's what killed me that I read near the end of the article:

The Center for Science in the Public Interest recommended Tuesday that editors adopt a three-year ban from publishing in their journals in failure-to-disclose cases.

But Drazen and DeAngelis said that would be impractical and unnecessary.

"Editors have very long institutional memories," Drazen said. "I think that's adequate in this case."

So... let's not regulate this issue? Just let the editors pick and choose what gets published based on bad journalistic practices? Keep it in-house?

Well, gee... that'll sure solve the problem. It has up to this point, hasn't it?

JDub

JAMA gets caught short again:

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CHICAGO (AP) -- Just days after announcing a crackdown on researchers who do not disclose drug company ties, the editor of a prestigious medical journal says she was misled again - this time by the authors of a study linking severe migraines to heart attacks in women.

"I suspect we are going to have a whole bunch of disclosures over the next few weeks because authors are going to see how dead serious we are," DeAngelis said.

I am going to keep watching this.

JDub