A study in JAMA this week concludes that “News articles reporting on medication studies often fail to report pharmaceutical company funding and frequently refer to medications by their brand names despite newspaper editors’ contention that this is not the case.” Excerpts:

“Even when this information is reported, it is seldom placed prominently in the text. As a result, those who learn about medical research from the news media may remain unaware of how the research has been funded. In addition, our analysis suggests that news articles usually refer to medications by their brand names rather than their generic names. As a result, those who read about medications in the US news media may frequently learn to refer to medications by their brand names.”

In a survey, most newspaper editors said they always or often disclosed drug company funding as part of the story – but the researchers’ analysis of news stories showed that NOT to be the case.

“Our study also showed that the majority of major newspapers lacked written policies on the reporting of pharmaceutical company funding and the use of generic medication names. Although most publications had unwritten policies specifying that company funding should be reported, only a few had unwritten policies concerning generic names. These findings may partially explain why journalists so frequently neglect to report when research has received company funding and so frequently refer to medications by their brand names. However, many articles in our analysis from publications with policies about the reporting of company funding and the use of generic names frequently did not follow these policies.

…Additionally, news releases—which many journalists rely on for summaries of technically difficult material—often fail to indicate when a study has been company funded. One study published in 2002, for example, found that only 22% of news releases issued by medical journals noted when a study had received company funding.

Our findings raise several concerns. For patients and physicians to evaluate new research findings, it is important that they know how the research was funded so they can assess whether commercial biases may have affected the results. Additionally, the use of generic medication names by the news media is preferable so that physicians and patients learn to refer to medications by their generic names, a practice that is likely to reduce medication errors and may decrease unnecessary health care costs.”

An Indiana University study found that HIV care providers in rural Indiana report significant stigma and discrimination in the rural medical referral system surrounding issues of HIV and substance abuse. Providers felt that these factors impeded their ability to offer quality care to their patients……..

According to the Fierce Pharma website, Pfizer kept increasing ad spending (by almost 25%) in 2007 while many drug companies were cutting their ad spending. The site says that one of Pfizer’s drugs, Lyrica, “saw its budget skyrocket 123 percent. In 2007, Pfizer won a new fibromyalgia indication for Lyrica–originally a nerve pain drug–and spent almost $74 million on promotion.”

Pfizer’s website says ” Fibromyalgia is a real medical condition. It includes all-over muscle pain that can make it hard to do even day-to-day tasks. The pain may vary from mild to severe.”

The woman in their ads must have the mild form. She’s sauntering around the French Quarter with her guy. I guess we’re supposed to believe that Lyrica allowed her to do that.

Back when the drug was approved, the New York Times asked if the disease was real. Excerpt:

“But other doctors — including the one who wrote the 1990 paper that defined fibromyalgia but who has since changed his mind — say that the disease does not exist and that Lyrica and the other drugs will be taken by millions of people who do not need them.”

Wired reports tha Senator John McCain has taken a stronger stance against embryonic stem cell research lately. Wired says McCain would even “criminalize a promising branch of stem cell research.”

In his statement, McCain at first claimed to support ESC research. However, he said “clear lines should be drawn that reflect a refusal to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for the sake of scientific progress” — a qualification that disturbed many scientists and bioethicists with its ambiguity.



McCain also took a harder line than the Bush administration with somatic cell nuclear transfer, better known as therapeutic cloning — a cutting-edge process that could some day provide personalized embryonic stem cell therapies. Though currently legal, McCain would outlaw the technique.



The new stance is an abrupt reversal for the Arizona senator. As recently as 2007, McCain appeared to favor embryonic stem cell research more strongly than most of the Republican party, especially its most religiously conservative members. “I believe that we need to fund this,” he said during a presidential candidates’ debate in May 2007.



Since then, he’s become steadily cagier in his support, courting Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, an ardent opponent of all ESC research, and avoiding discussion of ESCs in favor of alternative cell types. Those familiar with the debate interpreted McCain’s latest platform, which framed his support in the language of research opponents, as a signal that President Bush’s research-limiting policies may continue.

Wired notes that McCain would make it a “federal crime for researchers to use cells or fetal tissue from an embryo created for research purposes.” They quote a Harvard researcher who says he would be arrested for research he peforms today on somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

“I am researching SCNT and so would be considered a criminal if McCain gets his way,” said the Harvard researcher Daley. “It’s a sad society that starts criminalizing legitimate science.”

The article says that is an unlikely such a ban on SCNT would pas Congress. You can read another article about McCain’s stem cell positions and about criminalizing SCNT here. A ban on human cloning and the creation of human embryos is part of the GOP’s health platform. With this platform it seems they would also be against IVF.



Permalink | Recent Headlines | News Feeds

The Chicago Tribune, in the middle of a good story with a catchy headline – “The United States of Anxiety: Worried Sick Over Our Health Care” – includes some vital messages:

“Polls show voters worry a lot about health care and how much they spend on it. Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have responded by peddling plans they claim will help more Americans attain and afford care.

But neither candidate has focused publicly on treating the real problem: why American medical care costs too much and isn’t as good as it should be.

We waste money on tests and visits to specialists that don’t make us better. We spend big to add a few weeks or months to the inevitable end of a dying patient’s life. We use expensive technology at any cost, even when it exceeds our needs, and we fail to encourage simple, proactive steps that would keep us healthier and save us money. We often don’t know which treatments work the best, so we err on the side of too much care, for too much cost, with sometimes damaging consequences.

As a result, Americans pay significantly more for medical care than anyone else in the industrialized world. Every year, we spend a bigger chunk of our family budget on doctor bills, hospital stays and prescription drugs. Yet we trail several other nations in health-care quality, access and efficiency.

Most Americans have long assumed that more is better when it comes to their health: more doctors, more tests, more hospital time. But a decade of comprehensive studies suggests that all those visits and tests and hospital stays are often a waste of money—and sometimes a drag on our well-being.”

In its weekly e-newsletter, the Integrity in Science Watch project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest offers its “Cheers & Jeers” section on health journalism’s coverage of conflicts of interest among sources. This week they wrote:

Cheer to Mike Stobbe of the Associated Press for reporting the financial ties to General Electric of C. Daniel Johnson of the Mayo Clinic, who was lead researcher for a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week that showed virtual colonoscopy using CT scanning machines, which GE manufactures, was just as effective as regular colonoscopy for detecting colon polyps that can lead to cancer.

Jeer to Judith Graham of the Chicago Tribune for failing to note Johnson’s ties to GE in her story on the colon cancer screening study.

Jeer to Liz Szabo of USAToday, who quoted Harvard Medical School emeritus professor Robert Fletcher touting the availability of new and better colon cancer screening tests, for failing to note that Fletcher is a financial consultant to Exact Sciences, which is seeking Food and Drug Administration approval for a stool DNA colon cancer screening test. Fletcher’s ties to Exact Sciences were revealed in an NEJM editorial.

Sandy Szwarc, on her Junkfood Science blog, blasts lazy news coverage this week of “a study reportedly finding that acupuncture works to reduce the side effects of breast cancer treatment as effectively as conventional medicine, without the side effects.”

She counted at least 144 news stories and tied them to a news release issued by the Henry Ford Health System. She wrote:

“Whether it’s been from WebMD to the New York Times and every media outlet in between, the medical news has all simply repeated the script provided in the press release. ABC’s medical science reporter, John McKenzie, hadn’t even read the press release carefully to catch the date the abstract was to be presented and in his story published three days before it happened, he said the findings “were presented today at the ASTRO annual meeting,” as if he’d been there!

What are press releases? Marketing, of course. …

The level of media hype this week far outstripped the scientific merits of this research, but, no doubt, will encourage the spending of countless dollars on a modality that the strongest evidence suggests is little more than a placebo. That concerns us, too. At a time when everyone is talking about how expensive our healthcare system is, we can’t afford to waste public resources, or our insurance premiums. Dr. Walker was quoted in USA Today this morning lamenting that “many insurance plans don’t cover acupuncture,” while they do cover the medication. Surely, all of this marketing wasn’t about money.

Saddest is the false hope and misinformation that untold numbers of breast cancer patients heard this week, the subtle reinforcement of feelings of distrust and inferiority of their medical care and modern medicine, and the disservice these media stories provide by exploiting women at the most vulnerable time in their lives.”

Scientists have developed nanometer-sized ‘cargo ships’ that can sail throughout the body via the bloodstream without immediate detection from the body’s immune radar system and ferry their cargo of anti-cancer drugs and markers into tumors that might otherwise go untreated or undetected. In a forthcoming issue of the Germany-based chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT report that their nano-cargo-ship system integrates therapeutic and diagnostic functions into a single device that avoids rapid removal by the body’s natural immune system. Their paper is now accessible in an early online version here……..

From the New York Times:

Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, the director of the National Institutes of Health whose six-year tenure was marked by a conflict-of-interest scandal and an increasingly grim budget situation, will leave the agency at the end of October, the agency announced Wednesday.

A study published in the journal Oncology found less than one in five cancer clinical trials registered in the government database ClinicalTrials.gov wind up in medical journals. The authors conclude:

“Our findings raise concern about the completeness of the available information on present and future cancer treatments. If selective publication has altered the apparent risk– benefit assessments of cancer treatments, doctors and their patients may not be making treatment decisions that are in their best interest.”