Health Journal Comes Clean

By KEITH J. WINSTEIN
4 april 2008 - After embarrassing disclosures of financial links between authors of a lung-cancer study and two big corporations -- General Electric Co. and Vector Group Ltd. -- the New England Journal of Medicine published a correction, a clarification and an editorial calling for transparent disclosure of funding sources.
The lung-cancer study, which the journal published in 2006, has been controversial. It suggested that an annual screening with a CT scan could reduce the death rate from lung cancer, the top cancer killer. Critics said the study showed only that screening could detect cancers earlier -- not necessarily that it could avert deaths.
In today's correction, the New England Journal acknowledges that the study's lead authors, Claudia Henschke and David Yankelevitz of Cornell University's Weill Medical College in New York City, received royalties from GE, a big maker of CT scanners, for pending patents on ways to manipulate and interpret CT scans and other medical images. The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog reported the royalty payments last October. Dr. Henschke said then that the royalties were small and declining.
A spokesman for both doctors said they had told the New England Journal that Cornell had licensed the pending patents to GE before the study was printed in 2006, but not that they were personally receiving a share of the royalties. Jeffrey Drazen, the New England Journal's chief editor, said the publication had learned of the royalties only recently.
The New England Journal also published a "clarification" from Dr. Henschke, acknowledging that the study had been funded in part by tobacco giant Vector Group, the parent of Liggett Group LLC.
Vector had announced in 2000 that it was funding Dr. Henschke's work, but the 2006 journal article didn't note the connection to the tobacco industry. Vector's funding of the research study was reported last month in the New York Times. In a statement, Vector said it had contributed $3.6 million to Dr. Henschke's research and "had no control or influence over the research."
Dr. Drazen said the journal will ask future researchers to provide detailed information on the source of their funding. "It had not been a practice at the time to ask people about the pedigree of their sources," Dr. Drazen said. "This has been a learning process for us."
In its editorial, the New England Journal called for more-transparent disclosure of funding sources. Readers "cannot fully appreciate a study's meaning without acknowledging the subtle biases in design and interpretation that may arise when a sponsor stands to gain from the report," the journal's editors wrote. "We and our readers were surprised to learn that the source of the funding of the charitable foundation was, in fact, a large corporation that could have an interest in the study results."
The journal questioned the "advisability of research entities accepting funding from tobacco companies" except through a foundation set up in the wake of litigation between states and tobacco companies.