DOCTORS are being misled by some advertisements that cite independent research to endorse their products.
The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly using references to clinical trials to back up advertising claims. But when Pilar Villanueva, Salvador Peir贸 and colleagues at the Valencian School of Health Studies in Spain investigated 102 ads, they found that nearly half of the claims for greater effectiveness, safety or convenience were not supported by their corresponding references.
Doctors should be cautious of adverts making such claims, says Peir贸 in The Lancet (vol 361, p 27). Robert Fletcher, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, agrees that the problem is universal. Regulations governing claims in adverts are seldom enforced, he says.
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The researchers assessed all adverts for antihypertensive and lipid-lowering drugs that appeared in six Spanish medical journals during 1997. Any research references they contained were checked to see if they supported the claims made in the ads. Of the 102 adverts studied, 45 were found to be misleading. For example, many ads claimed the drugs were effective for groups of people not tested in the clinical trials.
鈥淚 cannot comment on other people鈥檚 motivations,鈥� says Fletcher. 鈥淏ut it is clear that advertising people have a strong incentive to promote their drugs, and most of these people have little grounding in science.鈥�