Statins
I recently covered how Big Pharma got statins into millions of US medicine chests, especially Lipitor and Crestor. During the same year JAMA had undisclosed funding from antidepressant makers, Harvard's Paul Ridker, (whose research put the statin Crestor on the map) also apologized to JAMA for omitted financial disclosures. For his article about cardiovascular clinical trials, he thought he only had to report funding for the "study at hand" and did not mention funding from AstraZeneca, Bayer, Novartis, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis and five other pharmaceutical companies.
Immune Suppressing Drugs
Weeks after Ridker's disclosure, another apology letter appeared in JAMA referring to a paper that had been published the previous year that looked at cancer risks in patients taking infliximab (Remicade, Enbrel) and adalimumab (Humira) for rheumatoid arthritis. Author Eric L. Matteson, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, and other Mayo researchers didn't tell the journal they had received $25,000 from Enbrel-maker Amgen ("The stipend was not linked to the study or systematic review of TNF-alpha antibodies"). Nor did the researchers tell JAMA they had let Abbott Laboratories, then the maker of Humira (now made by AbbVie), review the paper before it was published.
For people with serious conditions the drugs can be beneficial but for people with mild conditions the risks, which include cancer, are hard to justify. In fact, some are speculating the pneumonia and intestinal conditions that took the life of the Eagle's Glenn Frey in January were exacerbated by the RA drugs he took which invite opportunistic infections.
Does Disclosure Even Matter?
The medical journals' "disclosure-gates" reveal that doctors have more Pharma financial links than anyone thought and that some doctors think they have the ability and right to decide which are "relevant."
And there is another irony. The medical community and public may not even care. The current FDA Commissioner nominee Duke researcher Robert Califf is so steeped in Pharma money, some have said it amounts to a handover of the FDA to Big Pharma. Duke itself had a major research fraud that resulted in terminated grants, retracted papers and a Sixty Minutes special.
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