Prominent Doctors Aren’t Disclosing Their Industry Ties in Medical Journal Studies. And Journals Are Doing Little to Enforce Their Rules

One is dean of Yale’s medical school. Another is the director of a cancer center in Texas. A third is the next president of the most prominent society of cancer doctors.

These leading medical figures are among dozens of doctors who have failed in recent years to report their financial relationships with pharmaceutical and health care companies when their studies are published in medical journals, according to a review by ProPublica and The New York Times and data from other recent research.

In addition to the widespread lapses by doctors, the review by ProPublica and The Times found that journals themselves often gave confusing advice and did not routinely vet disclosures by researchers, although many relationships could have been easily detected on a federal database.

Medical journals, which are the main conduit for communicating the latest scientific discoveries to the public, often have an interdependent relationship with the researchers who publish in their pages. Reporting a study in a leading journal can heighten their profile — not to mention that of the drug or other product being tested. And journals enhance their cachet by publishing exclusive, breakthrough studies by acclaimed researchers.

In all, the reporting system still appears to have many of the same flaws that the Institute of Medicine identified nearly a decade ago when it recommended fundamental changes in how conflicts of interest are reported. Those have yet to happen.

The full ProPublica article can be viewed at this link.