Research In Brief

Ortho fee journal disclosures subpar: Less than half of inspected journal articles with authors who received $1 million or more in consulting fees from one of five orthopedic device firms in 2007 disclosed the financial relationship, researchers reported in an Archives of Internal Medicine study posted online Sept. 13. The team from the nonprofit Institute on Medicine as a Profession looked at online disclosures from Biomet, Johnson & Johnson/DePuy, Smith & Nephew, Stryker and Zimmer, which each started posting consultant payment data following a 2007 settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice on kickback allegations. They identified the 41 recipients of at least $1 million in 2007 and sampled each individual's most recent articles over the period of Jan. 1, 2008, through Jan. 15, 2009. Forty-six percent of the 95 sampled articles included a disclosure of the relationship, while only about 7% provided any information on the payment amounts. The disclosure rate was 54% for authors who were either listed first, last (senior position) or were sole authors compared to 32% for middle authors. No correlation was identified between disclosures and the stringency of a journal's disclosure policies. The researchers from IMAP, a group focused on researching and advocating for professionalism in medicine, recommended that journals collect more comprehensive information on commercial relationships from physicians and, in particular, make good use of the centralized disclosures on a government database that will go live on 2013 as a requirement of the sunshine provisions in the Affordable Care Act (1"The Gray Sheet" April 12, 2010)