A study published in BMJ Open claims 14.2% of industry payments made to published authors were undisclosed in two major psychiatric journals. The findings put further doubt on the psychiatric industry’s integrity assurance standards. This finding follows a 2020 study that revealed 55.7% of U.S. psychiatrists have accepted pharmaceutical industry funding.
Undisclosed Industry Payments Found in Top Psychiatry Journals – madinamerica.com
Research has shown that financial conflicts of interest (COIs) are a common issue in medicine and psychiatry, with a 2020 paper finding that 55.7% of US psychiatrists accepted some form of industry payment. Studies have found that the pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars per year making payments to clinical trial authors, DSM panel members, and FDA committee members, creating COIs at every level of the drug approval process. A 2021 Mad in America investigation revealed that industry paid psychiatrists alone $340 million between 2014 to 2020. The same investigation also reported that financial COIs were present in the testing of every new psychotropic drug approved by the FDA between 2013 to 2017.
A new study published in BMJ Open examines undisclosed financial COIs for physician-authors in two major US academic journals, the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) and the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry (JAMA-PSY). The current work finds that 14.2% of industry payments ($645,135) made to authors published in these two journals between 2020 and 2022 were undisclosed. This research, led by Francis Gesel of the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, additionally finds that nearly all undisclosed payments (96.2%) were made to authors conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs).
The authors write:
“In our study, 14.2% of the total payments in AJP and JAMA- PSY, amounting to $645,135.70, were undisclosed. These undisclosed payments predominantly comprised research payments (82.6%), with a smaller proportion being general payments (12.6%). The high prevalence of undisclosed payments suggests that existing disclosure policies are insufficient to ensure full transparency. ”