Media coverage of drug studies lacking, study says

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

The news media isn't doing a very good job when it comes to reporting on drug studies published in leading scientific journals, Cambridge researchers report. Journalists too often let readers down by leaving out information that might reflect bias in the results, and use brand names that might implicitly promote the drug in question, the researchers conclude.

Almost half of the stories in newspapers and on online news sites neglected to mention pharmaceutical company funding for drug trials whose results were published in high-impact medical journals, according to a review of more than 300 news articles conducted by Dr. Michael Hochman and colleagues from Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School. Their study was paid for by Cambridge Hospital. Hochman, a third-year resident in internal medicine, is a contributor to The Boston Globe.

More than a third of the news stories used only the brand name of the drug, the review also found.

"As a doctor I've become increasingly worried in recent years that company-funded research, to put it simply, can't be trusted. The rofecoxib scandal - better known as the Vioxx scandal - is one example of this," Hochman said in an interview. "I am worried that lay readers and patients don't always look at it this way and I think it's very important when patients or readers read a medical story that they are at least aware of who sponsored it and what the motives are of who sponsored it."

All the trials in question were paid for by drug companies and all had their funding sources included in the journal articles. A growing number of scientific journals require authors to make disclosures in order to reveal potential conflicts of interest.

Studies have shown that company-funded research is more likely to have favorable results than non company-funded research, Hochman said.

Researchers scrutinizing genetic data including samples from three generations of the Framingham Heart Study have discovered two new genes and confirmed a third that are linked to an elevated risk of developing gout - a painful form of arthritis caused by a buildup of uric acid in the blood.

The findings are the first published results based on Framingham medical information, which was made available to scientists around the world a year ago.

Led by Dr. Caroline S. Fox of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, an international team of scientists studied genetic variations among more than 7,000 Framingham Heart Study participants who agreed to give their genetic and clinical data to an online database called the SHARe program, short for SNP Health Association Resource. (SNP stands for single nucleotide polymorphism, which is a kind of genetic variation.) Other samples came from a large study in the Netherlands.

People who have all three genes have a risk of getting gout that is 40 times higher than people who don't have the genetic variations, the researchers report in The Lancet. About 3 million Americans suffer from gout.

Boston University ethicist George J. Annas takes his New England Journal of Medicine readers through a thicket of ethical issues entangling lethal-injection executions, constitutional law, and physician participation.

The Supreme Court has often considered whether the death penalty carried out in any form fits the Eighth Amendment definition of cruel and unusual punishment, but lately its task has been to weigh the thorny issue of whether the cocktail of drugs used to induce death also inflicts inordinate suffering. At issue is whether doctors can be involved in ensuring that lethal injection is "more humane."

The case Annas describes involves a drug that Kentucky has banned from use in euthanizing pets because of the risk of suffering. He concludes that doctors must refuse to, as Justice Harry Blackmum put it, "tinker with the machinery of death."

"Physicians should not lend their medical expertise to the state to make executions more palatable to the public, even by advising on drug protocols, doses, and routes of administration," Annas writes. "Even physicians who support the death penalty should stay out of its execution, because the problem that the state seeks to solve by using physicians is one of the state's own making by its refusal to abolish capital punishment and its insistence on execution by lethal injection."

ELIZABETH COONEY