Conflicts of Interest and Medical Treatment Guidelines

• “Many experts involved in assembling these guidelines in Canada have financial ties to drug makers. And the study authors recommend that medical societies implement tougher disclosure rules to avoid undermining clinical decisions.”

• “The researchers analyzed 350 authors who worked on 28 different treatment guidelines, some of whom actually worked on multiple documents. Altogether, they examined 400 financial conflicts of interest statements in connection with the guidelines published in 2012 and 2013.”

• “In 75 percent of the disclosures, at least one guideline author revealed such a relationship and in 21 percent of the guidelines, all of the authors disclosed a conflict with drug companies. More specifically, in 54 percent of the guidelines, at least one author revealed a conflict with the manufacturer of the drug they recommended for treatment. And in 29 percent of the guidelines, more than one of the authors did so.”
• “These guidelines “…provide specific drug treatment recommendations that are considered to be authoritative regarding doctors’ treatment decisions for their patients,” Adrienne Shnier, one of the researchers, told us. “Clinical practice guidelines are also widely distributed by medical associations. Therefore, the financial relationships held by the physician-authors of these guidelines is an important step towards analyzing their choices of drug recommendations.”
• “For the record, the researchers defined a financial conflict of interest as financial compensation, as well as activities that are generally associated with gifts, payments, or reimbursements, even if a monetary value was not disclosed.”
• “In 26 percent of the guidelines, at least one drug recommended for first-line treatment was manufactured by a drug company listed on the affiliated organization web site.”

“We encourage professional associations including the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) to consider developing a policy equivalent to that which was adopted by the Association of Scientific Medical Society in Germany on financial conflicts of interest disclosures and we recommend that the CMA refuse to list any clinical practice guidelines that do not conform to these standards.”