Posted by jane d on November 28, 2002, at 13:02:28
In reply to NY Times article on drug research (and Lexapro), posted by cannoli on November 25, 2002, at 9:54:19
> There was a good article in Friday's NY Times on drug company research. Among other things, it reports that drug research is increasingly being done not by academic researchers but by companies that are owned by advertising agencies. They also ghost-write articles for scientific journals. For anyone who is on Lexapro, there are some interesting facts about Lexapro marketing and the "Gorman study," too. You can read the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/business/22DRUG.html . Registering with nytimes.com is free.
I found this part interesting.Jane
From the article:For Forest and its ad agency partners, selling doctors on Lexapro is crucial.
Lexapro is not an entirely new drug, but rather a chemically refined version of Celexa, an antidepressant that accounts for 70 percent of the company's sales. Wall Street is counting on Forest to persuade doctors to switch Celexa users to Lexapro, because the older drug will lose its patent protection in 2004. Once the patent expires, Celexa sales will plummet, as generic companies begin offering low-priced versions of the drug.
But Forest can point to just one study concluding that Lexapro offers patients an advantage over Celexa — a study that the company paid to have published, and has promoted at dinners like one Dr. Brown attended at a Manhattan steakhouse, just two weeks after the meal at Daniel.
The paper, by Dr. Jack M. Gorman, until recently a professor at Columbia University and now on the faculty of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, pooled the results of three studies and concluded that Lexapro "may have a faster onset" than Celexa. Dr. Gorman's paper was published in CNS Spectrums, a medical journal he edits.
Forest said that it paid Medworks Media, a small medical marketing company that publishes the journal, to print Dr. Gorman's article in a special supplement.
Other researchers find the data less convincing. The Medical Letter, a nonprofit newsletter respected for its independence from the pharmaceutical industry, reviewed the same clinical trials as Dr. Gorman and concluded in September that Lexapro had not been shown to be better than any other antidepressant, including Celexa.
poster:jane d
thread:129191
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20021127/msgs/129752.html