Paxil Maker Accused of Having Articles Ghostwritten

Los Angeles, CAAmid the furor over reported Paxil side effects comes news that not all of the medical journal articles about the antidepressants were written by doctors. This could call into question the findings from those articles, especially those that may have painted Paxil in a good light. Meanwhile, women who are deciding whether or not to take Paxil while pregnant are still left weighing the potential risk of Paxil birth defects against the risk caused by being depressed while pregnant.

However, recent news about the use of ghostwriters to promote Paxil will probably not make that decision any easier.

According to the Associated Press (August 19, 2009), documents released in court show that GlaxoSmithKline used a ghostwriting program in the promotion of its drug, Paxil. Specifically, the documents reportedly show that doctors were allowed to take credit for articles submitted to medical journals when those articles were actually written by consultants for the drug maker.

Furthermore, the AP reports, an internal company memo from April, 2000, "instructs salespeople to offer to help physicians write and publish articles about their positive experiences prescribing Paxil."

A spokesperson for GlaxoSmithKline responded to the report by saying that the ghostwriting program was not heavily used and was discontinued. The AP reports that articles from the ghostwriting program appeared in five journals between 2000 and 2002. One of the journals included in the program was the American Journal of Psychiatry.

An article by David Healy in the Guardian (guardian.co.uk, August 8, 2009), notes that, "The process of manufacturing clinical consensus has become so slick that it is now almost impossible to find independent articles from academic physicians with no links to industry that will sound a note of caution about prescribing antidepressants to women of child-bearing years." He further states that this issue has spread to other areas of medicine and is not limited to antidepressants.

"Firms of medical writers are contracted to pharmaceutical companies to place in academic journals articles attributed to, but not actually authored by, university researchers," Healy writes. Healy is a professor in Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine, Wales. In his article he notes that he has testified in the US in trials involving antidepressants.

Paxil, an antidepressant in a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), has been under scrutiny for a variety of reported issues. Those include a reported link between the use of Paxil during the first trimester of pregnancy and birth defects and an increased risk of suicidal behavior in young adults who take the antidepressant.