Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company, paid a medical writing company to ghostwrite articles about its hormone replacement therapy Prempro, according to U.S. Senator Charles Grassley. Wyeth makes the hormone replacement drugs Prempro and Premarin.

Sen. Grassley asked the medical writing company, based in New Jersey, and DesignWrite, to provide details including payment for the articles on Prempro and the involvement of scientists who signed them, the New York Times reported. Senator Charles Grassley leads the Congressional inquiry which is currently demanding that top researchers provide their conflict-of-interest disclosures, and Mr. Grassley is comparing those documents with records of actual payments from drug companies.
Sen. Grassley has revealed certain financial relationships between drugmakers and doctors, but it seems that the same thing is happening in journalism.

“Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, that can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe drugs that may not work and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling,” Grassley wrote in a letter to Wyeth, based in Madison, New Jersey. Furthermore, the letter asked the two companies to disclose payments made to prepare the articles and the activities of doctors recruited to place their names on those articles.

Grassley says Wyeth executives prepared outlines for ghost-written articles, and then arranged the writing and found scientists to put their names to them, the newspaper reported. For example, an allegedly ghostwritten article in the May 2003 issue in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology said there was “no definitive evidence” for a link between Wyeth’s Prempro hormone-replacement product and an increased risk of breast cancer, following a big federal study which linked the product use to breast cancer risk.