Documents opened as part of a lawsuit against pharmaceuticals manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals have revealed that the company used ghostwriters to prepare 40 medical journal articles. These articles were written to promote the use of the company's hormone-replacement drug, Prempro.
Use of hormone replacement therapy dropped, with a corresponding drop in breast cancer rates. Since then, more than 10,000 women affected by side effects have filed lawsuits against drugmakers Pfizer and Wyeth. More than 8,000 of these lawsuits have been combined into a single case, before US District Judge William Wilson in Arkansas.
Wilson ordered to unseal Wyeth's ghostwriting documents in response to a request by the defendants - the New York Times and the journal PLoS Medicine. The documents revealed that Wyeth paid medical communications firms to ghostwrite at least 40 articles between 1997 and 2005. The communications firms also reportedly secured doctors to put their names on the studies as authors.
The articles, published in 18 different medical journals, promoted hormone replacement for treatment of not only menopause symptoms, but also other conditions such as Parkinson's disease. Both Wyeth and the studies' purported authors did not inform the journals that the studies were funded by the company. The journals were also not informed about the writers being employed by the company.
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