Dr. John Eden, an associate professor at the University of NSW and the director of the Sydney Menopause Centre, has reportedly been caught up in a US Senate enquiry. The enquiry is probing whether big pharmaceutical firms are paying ghostwriters to write journal articles favourable to their products. Dr. Eden has been charged with allowing his name to be put to a text sympathetic to a therapy even after it was linked to breast cancer.
The article, allegedly written with the aid of paid ghostwriters, appeared in the American Journal Of Obstetrics & Gynecology, a journal published by Elsevier, in May 2003. It said that there was no definitive evidence that progestins cause breast cancer, and added that hormone users had a better chance of surviving cancer. Dr Eden has, however, stated that he stands by the article.
Earlier this month, Senator Chuck Grassley alleged that pharmaceuticals firm Wyeth commissioned articles to promote its hormone replacement therapy (HRT), Prempro, and other products and had them ghostwritten by DesignWrite, a medical communications company. The letters sent to Wyeth and DesignWrite is part of a continuing US investigation into drug industry influence on doctors.
The New York Times has reported that in 2001, at the peak of hormone therapy, more than 126 million prescriptions for such drugs were written for women in the US. Sales that year - primarily by Wyeth - were $3 billion. But after an adverse finding by the Women's Health Initiative, sales of the drugs plummeted. Media reports further state that documents released by Grassley's staff, gathered from lawsuits in the US, show Wyeth executives came up with ideas for medical journal articles and paid writers to draft the manuscripts. The company then recruited academic authors and identified publications to run the articles without disclosing the company's role to journal editors or readers.
However, there is no evidence that Dr. Eden was aware of any efforts that may be alleged on the part of Wyeth executives to commission articles that may have been deliberately misleading or inaccurate. Wyeth officials have denied the charges of making any payment to the authors of the articles, and emphasised that the authors had "substantive editorial control" of the articles.
Elsevier has announced plans to investigate Grassley's allegations against the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
