Medical Industry Ties Often Undisclosed in Journals

Twenty-five out of 32 highly paid consultants to medical device companies in 2007, or their publishers, failed to reveal the financial connections in journal articles the following year, according to a study released on Monday. The study compared major payments to consultants by orthopedic device companies with financial disclosures the consultants later made in medical journal articles, and found them lacking in public transparency.

“We found a massive, dramatic system failure,” said David J. Rothman, a professor and president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, who wrote the study with two other Columbia researchers, Susan Chimonas and Zachary Frosch.

The study, published on the Web site of The Archives of Internal Medicine, focused on 32 medical doctors and doctoral researchers who were each paid at least $1 million in 2007 and published one or more journal articles the next year.

Most of the doctors and most of the orthopedic journal articles did not disclose their financial relationships with companies, the study found.