Life sciences paychecks growing, survey finds

Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community

Working in the life sciences has gotten more rewarding, a magazine survey says.

The median total compensation for life scientists is $85,000, up 13 percent from $74,000 in 2006, according to The Scientist magazine online poll. The survey asked readers to report their own compensation and demographic information, and from February to June, 4,702 did so.

As expected, industry's median pay package of $107,000 is better than the $77,900 paid by academic or private institutions. Since 2004, salaries have grown at a 25 percent clip at publicly traded pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, while universities and private institutions have seen an increase of 17.8 percent, the survey found.

Some specialties perch higher on the ladder than others: Endocrinology, for example, is on top with a median of $159,000 and molecular biology brings in the least, with $101,000 for a tenured position.

In academia, the Massachusetts median for full professors is $149,000; $132,000 for associate professors; and $121,500 for assistant professors.

Prescription drug ads on TV have become part of direct-to-consumer advertising since 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration loosened the rules on pitching to patients in their living rooms instead of through their doctors.

But researchers from Harvard and the University of Alberta say in a British Medical Journal article that such advertising may not be a slam-dunk for sales. For two of the three drugs they studied - Enbrel and Nasonex (above) - advertising made virtually no difference in prescriptions written. For the third, Zelnorm, a spike in sales was brief. That differs from previous work showing a correlation between drug sales and ad dollars.

Researchers were surprised by their results, which came in a trial that used French-speaking Canadians as a control group for English-speaking Canadians exposed to ads on American TV. "We expected to see a substantial impact for each and every one of the drugs," not just one, said Michael Law, a research fellow in the department of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Medical School.

The authors concluded that the difference was this: Enbrel and Nasonex had over-the-counter and prescription alternatives, but Zelnorm was marketed as the one drug to ease what had formerly been untreatable.

Doctors are more likely to take their own lives than are the rest of us. Their suicide rate is 40 percent higher for male physicians and 130 percent higher for female physicians than for other men and women. A new study suggests the increased risk may begin with burnout - being emotionally exhausted, feeling depersonalized, and having low levels of accomplishment - in medical school.

Researchers surveyed more than 4,000 students at seven medical schools about their mental health and quality of life in 2006 and again in 2007. An online questionnaire asked students whether they had ever thought about suicide, ever attempted suicide, or considered suicide in the last year.

About half said they were suffering from burnout and about one in nine said they had thought about suicide in the past year. (Forty-three students said they had tried to kill themselves in the past.) Students were two to three times more likely to say they had suicidal thoughts if they also said they had burnout. When depression, which almost half the students reported, was considered separately in the survey of medical students, the burnout connection still held up.

The higher students scored on the symptoms of burnout in the first year of the survey, the more likely they were to report having thought about suicide when asked a year later. And students who felt burnout one year but not the next said their thoughts about suicide subsided.

"This relationship is notable because burnout seems to be a much more common form of distress among medical students," Dr. Liselotte Dyrbye of the Mayo Clinic and her coauthors write in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Medical school can hamper students' ability to deal with everyday stresses, said Dr. Daniel Kirsch, a staff psychiatrist at UMass Memorial Medical Center and director of the house officer and student counseling service at University of Massachusetts Medical School, both in Worcester. He was not part of the study. The results, he said, should spur students and physicians to get help.

ELIZABETH COONEY