Archive for the ‘Medical Journals’ Category
DTC Advertising: Doctors Still Hate It But Industry Continues to Use It
New England Journal of Medicine recently published a paper looking at “A Decade of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs”, where the study authors looked at pharma company spending on DTC advertising and physician promotion in the past 10 years (1996-2006). The authors also looked at the FDA regulation of drug advertising during this time. While drug companies’ promotional spending went from $11.4 billion (1996) to $29.9 billion (2005) where DTC ad expenditures grew by 330%, this made up “only” 14% of the almost $30 billion in drug companies’ promotional spend.
On the other hand, FDA’s warning letters fell from 142 in 1997 to 21 in 2006. The authors speculate this could either be due to drug companies becoming better behaved and playing by the rules, or due to the FDA being too short-staffed to follow up on all violative behaviors. I’m skeptical whether this reduction in FDA warning letters is mostly due to staff shortage at the FDA given how steep this drop was (142 to 21 per year); while I’d like to think that drug companies are finally being “scared straight” by the various scandals and class action lawsuits in the recent years, I’m also not so much of a pollyanna to believe that no violative behaviors are being produced. Still, it looks like DTC is here to stay, as much as many doctors loathe it with a passion of a thousand suns. Read the rest of this entry »
Updated Heart Attack Treatment Guidelines
This week the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology have published updated treatment guidelines for heart attacks (or, as the journal article titled it, “Update of the Clinical Competence Statement on Cardiac Interventional Procedures”). The entire update is currently available in full from the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) via this link (technical). According to Reuters Health, which reported on this update, the guidelines focus on identifying patients at risk early and the right treatment. In patients with “low risk”, medication therapy is recommended, and tests of cardiac functions are suggested. In patients with “high risk” intervention including angioplasty is recommended.
