HRT ghost stories
Wednesday September 8th, 2010
"Ghost-writers" were used to promote the benefits of now discredited hormone replacement therapies, according to a major analysis published last night.
A medical writing company was paid up to $25,000 an article for writing reviews of the drugs.
The articles claimed that HRT could benefit the heart and promoted "unproven" benefits such as preventing wrinkles, dementia and Parkinson's disease, according to the analysis in the journal PLoS Medicine.
Some 1,500 documents have been made public about the history of HRT as part of a legal action by women in the USA claiming that hormones extracted from horses gave them breast cancer.
The analysis showed that a communications company was paid $20,000 dollars a time for 20 ghost-written review articles - although fees increased by 25 per cent.
Such articles would have carried the names of medical experts, who had not produced the content. The PLoS Medicine article says they were submitted to the pharmaceutical company Wyeth for approval and amendments before being sent to the experts.
Researcher Dr Adriane Fugh-Berman, of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC, an expert witness for the women in the trial, writes: "Given the growing evidence that ghost-writing has been used to promote hormone therapy and other highly promoted drugs, the medical profession must take steps to ensure that prescribers renounce participation in ghostwriting, and to ensure that unscrupulous relationships between industry and academia are avoided rather than courted."
Tags: North America | Pharmaceuticals | Women’s Health & Gynaecology
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