Why Are These Fraudulent Papers Unretracted?
According to Science Times[1], the Tuesday science section in the New York Times, scientific retractions are on the rise because of a “dysfunctional scientific climate” that has created a “winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.”
But elsewhere, audacious, falsified research stands unretracted–including the work of authors who actually went to prison for fraud!
Richard Borison, MD, former psychiatry chief at the Augusta Veterans Affairs medical center and Medical College of Georgia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for a $10 million clinical trial fraud[2] but his 1996 US Seroquel® Study Group research is unretracted.[3] In fact, it is cited in 173 works and medical textbooks, misleading future medical professionals.[4]
Scott Reuben, MD, the “Bernie Madoff” of medicine who published research on clinical trials that never existed, was sentenced to six months in prison in 2010.[5] But his “research” on popular pain killers like Celebrex and Lyrica is unretracted.[6] If going to prison for research fraud is not enough reason for retraction, what is?
Wayne MacFadden, MD, resigned as US medical director for Seroquel in 2006, after sexual affairs with two coworker women researchers surfaced[7], but the related work is unretracted and was even part of Seroquel’s FDA approval package for bipolar disorder.[8]
More than 50 ghostwritten papers about hormone therapy (HT) written by Pfizer’s marketing firm, Designwrite, ran in medical journals, according to unsealed court documents on the University of California–San Francisco’s Drug Industry Document Archive.[9] Though the papers claimed no link between HT and breast cancer and false cardiac and cognitive benefits and were ghostwritten by marketing professionals not doctors, none has been retracted.
Pfizer/Parke-Davis placed 13 ghostwritten articles[10] in medical journals promoting Neurontin for offlabel uses, including a supplement to the Cleveland Clinic[11] but only Cochrane Database Systematic Reviews and Protocols has retracted the specious articles.[12]
Nor is the phony science just a product of “Big Pharma.” In 2008, JAMA was forced to print a correction stating that authors of an article arguing for a higher recommended dietary allowance of protein were, in fact, industry operatives. [13] Sharon L. Miller was “formerly employed by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association,” and author Robert R. Wolfe, PhD, received money from the Egg Nutrition Center, the National Dairy Council, the National Pork Board, and the Beef Checkoff through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said the clarification. Miller’s email address, in fact was smiller@beef.org, which should might have been the JAMA editors’ first tip-off.[14] The article has also not been retracted.
Martha Rosenberg’s is an investigative health reporter. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, has just been released by Prometheus books.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/rise-in-scientific-journal-retractions-prompts-calls-for-reform.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
[2] Steve Stecklow and Laura Johannes, “Test Case: Drug Makers Relied on Two Researchers Who Now Await Trial,” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 1997
[3] Richard Borison et al., “ICI 204,636, an Atypical Antipsychotic: Efficacy and Safety in a Multicenter, Placebo-Controlled Trial in Patients with Schizophrenia,” Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology 16, no. 2 (April 1996): 158–69
[4] Alan F. Schatzberg and Charles B. Nemeroff, Textbook of Psychopharmacology (New York: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2009) p. 609
[5] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-medical-madoff-anesthestesiologist-faked-data
[6] Scott Reuben et al., “The Analgesic Efficacy of Celecoxib, read more..
Monday, 4 June 2012
Journal Of Clinical Psychopharmacology-Veterans Affairs Medical Center-Medical College Of Georgia
Friday, 9 March 2012
Abbott Laboratories-Cholesterol Drugs-Medical Journals-Jerry Hoffman
I reprint the following from my post of November 21, 2011:
I've previously mentioned the Primary Care Medical Abstracts program run by my friends Rick Bukata and Jerry Hoffman, in which subscribers receive a CD each month with commentary on 30 recently published papers from medical journals. Since both Rick and Jerry are concerned about the impact of Pharma marketing on medical science and practice, it's not uncommon for several of the papers each month to address topics of interest to this blog. The October, 2011 issue had an especially impressive bumper crop. Here are capsule summaries of some of the papers.
Who's Marketing the Heck Out of Useless Cholesterol Drugs?
Before statins came along, an older class of drugs, the fibrates, was employed in attempts to lower cholesterol. Recent research has documented thoroughly that these drugs have no place in the medical armamentarium. Yet these authors noted a 117% increase in fibrate prescriptions between 2002 and 2009. Was this because physicians all on their own decided to go back to this old class of drugs? Hardly; the data show that newer brand-name fibrates are selling much better than older generics. So it seems that creative drug marketing has resurrected a class of drugs that should have been sent to the retirement home long ago.
Jackevicius CA, Tu JV, Ross JS, et al. Use of fibrates in the United States and Canada. JAMA 305:1217-1224, March 23/30, 2011
Okay, so you might ask, just how is Pharma going about twisting docs' arms to get them to prescibe more and more of these useless drugs?
Enter Marilyn Mann, who except for the fact that she reads this blog regularly is an eminently sane person. She posted a clue to this puzzle on her blog, which is called, for some strange reason, Marilyn Mann's Blog:
http://marilynmann.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/abbott-laboratories-sponsors-review-article-on-its-own-drug/
Marilyn, tipped off by Dr. Harlan Krumholz at Yale, provides links to a so-called review article on fibrate drugs. The fine print at the end of the article says that Abbott Laboratories, which by the merest coincidence manufactures two fibrates, paid the publisher to print this article. The disclaimer goes on to note that Abbott did not directly pay the authors. But the lead author is "medical editor" of the journal. I rather doubt that he does this out of the goodness of his heart, so I assume that the publisher pays him. So Abbott pays the publisher and the publisher pays the author, but Abbott does not pay the author. Okay, now it's all clear.
The tried and true tricks that the article trots out for our edification (hitting the high points only) are, first, including really glitzy graphics to illustrate what fibrates do at the chemical and cellular levels (a sure tipoff of generous Pharma funding; the average medical journal, unless they are high rollers like New England Journal, simply cannot afford cute color graphics)--thereby increasing the scientific panache of the paper without really saying anything important for clinical medicine; second, stressing surrogate endpoints--in this case, how much fibrates reduce blood levels of triglycerides, without mentioning that there's no correlation between making your lab numbers look better and your living any longer; and finally, omitting the key take home message, which is that all studies of actual patient outcomes in fibrates show that they reduce the rate of some cardiovascular events, some of the time, but don't budge the mortality rate. In other words, if you don't want to die of a heart attack, but would rather die just as quickly of something else instead, take fibrates. (In fairness, this point is mentioned, though effectively buried, in the text of the article, but is completely absent from the abstract--which is the only part of the article many, if not most, busy practitioners read.)
Marilyn wants to know why any physician would bother to read such drek, and why a read more..