July 09, 2007

Today's Wall Street Journal has two excellent articles in its Marketplace section that nicely illustrate the contrast between how studies from industry are perceived in contrast to those conducted by government.

In the first article, an interview with GSK CEO Jean-Pierre Garnier, Garnier defends his company's research on its diabetes drug Avandia amid suggestions that it may cause an increase in heart risk for some patients. GSK is on the defensive, and will undoubtedly spend millions of dollars defending itself from Avandia litigation even if its interpretation of the data is eventually vindicated.

In the second article, How the NIH Misread Hormone Study in 2002, reporter Tara Parker-Pope describes how recent revelations regarding the 2002 Women's Health Initiative study make clear that its initially reported findings "were either misleading or just wrong".

Pope's article is disturbing because it appears that government investigators deliberately framed the study's initial findings in such a way as to push pre-conceived conclusions.

Pope quotes one of the lead investigators in the study, Jacques Rossouw, as saying that "Our main job at the time was to turn around the prevailing notion that hormones would be useful for long-term prevention of heart disease. That was a worthy objective that we achieved."

This "worthy objective" led some women who were taking hormones and were benefitting from them to stop taking them as a result of the study's draconian - and since refuted - findings that were heavily biased against hormone treatments. As a result, some women who were benefitting from the hormones probably had heart attacks or even died.

If a pharmaceutical company had behaved this way, there would be immediate Congressional hearings and an avalanche of lawsuits.

Where's the outrage?

Posted by Paul Howard at July 9, 2007 04:13 PM