Did you catch the front-page story in yesterday’s New York Times
chronicling how, from 1998 to 2005, pharmaceutical giant Wyeth paid
ghostwriters to produce scientific papers that “emphasized the benefits and
de-emphasized the risks” of hormone-replacement therapy ?
You may recall that several years back, hundreds of thousands of menopausal women came off the very popular HRT after researchers documented a link between the hormone drugs and rising incidences of breast cancer (as well as heart disease, stroke and blood clots) among women being treated with HRT.
This should not have come as a complete surprise: the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has listed estrogens as known human carcinogens since 1987, and their component hormones since 1976. But what’s more troubling is that we now know that the rush to HRT was based not so much on a lack of information of the risks, but on a misinformation campaign funded the makers of the HRT drugs
Medical journals have some soul-searching to do. Why is it that they did not (and in most cases still do not) require of their contributors full disclosure of conflicts of interest? Our health, even our very lives, hang in the balance.
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