Abstract
Professional and financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and persons and institutions carrying out research, conducting medical training, and practicing medicine can lead to individual or corporate interests influencing decision-making and professional judgment. These conflicts of interest threaten the integrity of research, the objectivity of medical education, the quality of patient care and, more generally, public confidence in medicine. A strategy to protect research integrity and maintain public trust is for authors to communicate their possible conflicts of interest in the studies they publish. This paper analyses the editorial policies of the 16 clinically oriented biomedical journals published in Spain that were included in the JCR in 2011, in relation to authors’ conflict of interest declarations. Results show that, in their instructions to authors, most journals mention the need to disclose possible conflicts of interest and offer some sort of description of such situations. However, the definitions are lax concerning which economic relations should be declared and do not specify the extent of personal relationships. In most cases there is no standard form for declaring conflicts of interest; there is no indication of the period of time during which a relationship can be considered likely to generate a conflict; there is no indication of who will evaluate these statements and how they will be evaluated; and there is no indication as to whether these statements will be published in the articles.
Highlights
Professional and financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and persons and institutions carrying out research, conducting medical training, and practicing medicine can lead to individual or corporate interests influencing decisionmaking and professional judgment
Estas publicaciones atraen mucha publicidad y, dado que las compañías farmacéuticas sólo pueden hacer publicidad de sus productos a los médicos, se crea un lucrativo mercado que supone una importante fuente de recursos económicos para las revistas: 90.000 médicos en los Estados Unidos reciben gratuitamente el British Medical Journal gracias exclusivamente a los recursos generados por la publicidad (Smith, 2003)
Practice, vol 18 (6), 565-568. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ fampra/18.6.565
Summary
Los pacientes y la sociedad en general se benefician de la colaboración entre la comunidad médica, el mundo académico y la industria farmacéutica, de la que resultan continuados avances en el conocimiento (Forbes, 2011). Pero estas relaciones pueden generar conflictos reales o percibidos: desde diversos ámbitos se han señalado los riesgos asociados a los vínculos financieros entre la industria y las personas e instituciones que llevan a cabo investigación médica, formación o atención a los pacientes, ya que pueden provocar que intereses individuales o corporativos influyan en la toma de decisiones y en el juicio profesional. Los conflictos de interés son ubicuos en cualquier estructura social, pero su asociación con los científicos y la investigación médica es reciente y su gestión está todavía evolucionando (Krimsky, 2003). Si bien son una realidad reconocida e incluso regulada en otros sectores de actividad, se trata de un concepto relativamente nuevo entre la comunidad científica que, en general, los observa de manera diferente a como lo hacen las personas en otras profesiones. Por ejemplo, aunque gran parte de los médicos cree que sus decisiones no se ven influenciadas por las acciones de marketing de la industria farmacéutica, la evidencia en sentido contrario es abundante (Greenberg, 2012)
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