The October 2005 edition of the BJGP arrived as I was chomping into my breakfast pastry last week. As I brushed the crumbs away, I espied the article ‘The impact of obesity on drug prescribing in primary care’ authored by the delightfully titled Counterweight Project Team (they must have had a blast coming up with that team title!).1
The study concludes that obesity more that doubled prescribing in most drug categories in general practice. Hmm — not exactly the Third Secret of Fatima but still, a worthy and practical piece of research, and certainly relevant to general practice.
Then I saw the competing interests. Sponsored by Roche Products Ltd.
I think that this study is worthy of comment, not because of any groundbreaking insights into obesity, but because it raises very important questions about sponsorship, ethics and possible conflicts of interest when doctors undertake research under the sponsorship of a pharmaceutical company.
Did anybody really expect that a study on obesity, funded by an ‘unrestricted educational grant’ from the company that manufactures Xenical, would have been submitted had the results shown anything other than those favourable to aggressive treatment of obesity? The authors themselves acknowledge the possibility of bias in that some of the practices involved are involved in an obesity audit. Unfortunately, acknowledging possible bias does not make the bias disappear.
While we gratefully acknowledge the support of pharmaceutical companies for our research, continuing medical education and so on, I wonder if this study would ever have seen the light of day if the results had been perhaps less emphatically in favour of aggressive treatment of obesity.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2006.
