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A study published Tuesday in the online British Medical
Journal revealed that DTC drug marketing campaigns have very little effect on
sales, although since 2005, pharmaceutical companies have been spending a lot
of money to advertise directly to patients.
The study was conducted by a group of researchers in Canada, where
direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs is illegal. The only two countries that
allow DTC drug ads are the United States
and New Zealand.
Nevertheless, Canadians are often exposed to American media so, using
French-speaking Quebec as a control group, the
researchers comparatively monitored for five years the prescription rates in
English-speaking Canadian provinces and Quebec.
They performed the study on three different drugs: Enbrel
(for rheumatoid arthritis), Nasonex (for nasal allergies) and Zelnorm (for
irritable bowel syndrome), tracking prescription statistics according to data
delivered by IMS Health Canada, a health information company that receives data
from approximately 2,700 Canadian pharmacies.
Results showed that DTC advertising did not affect in any
way the sales for the former two drugs, while the latter’s sales went up by 40%
when the campaign began, but the spike did not last very long.
Therefore, it seems that the concerns about consumers
starting to ask for drugs they see advertised in print and on TV, to which the
Food and Drug Administration’s decision to ease its regulations-in 1997-gave
rise, are bound to disappear.
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