Drug ads hike costs but not sales, study says

Drug ads take a lot of heat. Ubiquitous TV commercials aimed at consumers are blamed both for spurring patient demand and boosting health care costs. But only one of those may be true, according to a new Harvard study.

Researchers led by Michael Law, formerly a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and now a health policy researcher at the University of British Columbia, tested the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising on clopidogrel, sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis as Plavix. Prescribed to prevent blood clots in people who have had heart attacks, it was initially sold without being marketed directly to patients. The researchers analyzed sales three years before and four years after consumer ads began so they could isolate the effect of the ads from promotions to physicians or free samples distributed when the drug was new.

Looking at pharmacy data from Medicaid programs in 27 states, including Massachusetts, they found that sales have steadily risen since the drug was introduced, moving up in a pattern that did not change from 1999 through 2005. But the cost to the Medicaid programs did rise by $207 million after ads began in 2002, the authors report in tomorrow's Archives of Internal Medicine. The drug's maker raised the price 12 percent, or 40 cents per pill, when it launched the $350 million ad campaign.

"The Bristol-Myers Squibb/Sanofi partnership supports direct-to-consumer advertising as a way to encourage consumers to play a more active role in their health care,” Laura Hortas, a Bristol-Myers spokeswoman, told Bloomberg News today.

The study's conclusions are consistent with what Law and colleagues at the University of Alberta reported last year about three heavily advertised drugs.

"We found similar lackluster results for drugs advertised directly to patients," Law said in an interview. "It makes us continue to wonder why so much is being spent on these activities."