Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Context Physicians are regularly confronted with research that is funded or presented by industry.
Objective To assess whether physicians discount for conflicts of interest when weighing evidence for prescribing a new drug.
Design and setting Participants were presented with an abstract from a single clinical trial finding positive results for a fictitious new drug. Physicians were randomly assigned one version of a hypothetical scenario, which varied on conflict of interest: ‘presenter conflict’, ‘researcher conflict’ and ‘no conflict’.
Participants 515 randomly selected Fellows in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' Collaborative Ambulatory Research Network; 253 surveys (49%) were returned.
Main object measures The self-reported likelihood that physicians would prescribe the new drug as a first-line therapy.
Results Physicians do not significantly discount for conflicts of interest in their self-reported likelihood of prescribing the new drug after reading the single abstract and scenario. However, when asked explicitly to compare conflict and no conflict, 69% report that they would discount for researcher conflict and 57% report that they would discount for presenter conflict. When asked to guess how favourable the results of this study were towards the new drug, compared with the other trials published so far, their perceptions were not significantly influenced by conflict of interest information.
Conclusion While physicians believe that they should discount the value of information from conflicted sources, they did not do so in the absence of a direct comparison between two studies. This brings into question the effectiveness of merely disclosing the funding sources of published studies.
- Conflict
- drugs and drug industry
- literature
- pharmaceutical
- physician
- prescribe
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Supplementary materials
Web only data
Files in this Data Supplement:
Footnotes
Funding This study was supported in part by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and grant no R60 MC 05674 from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Health Resources and Services Administration, Department of Health and Human Services.
Competing interests None.
Ethics approval This study was conducted with the approval of the Carnegie Mellon University Institutional Review Board.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
- The concise argument
Other content recommended for you
- Interactions of doctors with the pharmaceutical industry
- Legislative, educational, policy and other interventions targeting physicians’ interaction with pharmaceutical companies: a systematic review
- Interactions between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry generally and sales representatives specifically and their association with physicians’ attitudes and prescribing habits: a systematic review
- Medical students’ exposure to and attitudes towards product promotion and incentives from the pharmaceutical industry in 2019: a national cross-sectional study in France
- Perceptions of the provision of drug information, pharmaceutical detailing and engagement with non-personal promotion at a large physicians network: a mixed-methods study
- Ten years later: a review of the US 2009 institute of medicine report on conflicts of interest and solutions for further reform
- Conflict of interest among Italian medical oncologists: a national survey
- General practitioners and pharmaceutical sales representatives: quality improvement research
- Ethical issues raised by the introduction of payment for performance in France
- Biomedical conflicts of interest: a defence of the sequestration thesis—learning from the cases of Nancy Olivieri and David Healy