2982 Discrepancies Between Author- and Industry-Reported Disclosures of Financial Relationships in Gynecologic Research

Abstract

Study Objective To investigate the concordance between author disclosures of financial and commercial interests and the data available on reported industry transactions present in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Open Payments database (OPD). Design Data was collected from an abstract booklet for a 2018 gynecologic annual meeting, including information on author specialty, number of abstracts published, and the number and nature of the listed disclosures. This was compared to data available for each author in the OPD in 2017, which included the amount and nature of all industry payments. Setting Retrospective observational study. Patients or Participants All authors with abstracts published in a 2018 gynecologic annual meeting abstract booklet. Interventions N/A. Measurements and Main Results A total of 544 authors were identified in the abstract booklet. Of these authors, 515 (94.7%) had no disclosures listed while 29 (5.3%) had one or more disclosure listed. Of the 515 authors without any disclosures, 219 (42.5%) had industry payments recorded in the OPD. A majority (1690/2514, 67.2%) of the industry payments were categorized as “Food and Beverage” payments. Of 16 authors with multiple abstracts and at least one disclosure listed, 12 (75.0%) had discordance in reported disclosures between their own abstracts. In total, 244 (44.8%) authors were found to have industry relationships in the OPD, comprising over 2.2 million dollars of industry payments with a median payment of $76.46 (IQR $22.52-$179.85). Conclusion Many authors at a major gynecologic annual meeting did not correctly disclose some or all of their industry relationships, and those that did often failed to correctly disclose those relationships across their presented work. A majority of payments, however, were related to food and beverage transactions and the median payment overall remained low.