| SSRI_Not_for_babies@nospam.org 2005-04-27, 11:48 am |
| TV ads influence drug prescriptions: U.S. study
CTV.ca News Staff
Patients who tell their doctor about a specific medication they saw in a
television ad often walk out with an unnecessary prescription, a new U.S. study
has found.
In an unusual experiment documented in this week's edition of the Journal of the
American Medical Association, actors made unannounced visitors to doctors.
Feigning the symptoms of a mild form of depression -- a condition that does not
require antidepressants -- they followed one of three scripts.
In one, they mentioned having seen an ad for the brand-name antidepressant
Paxil, and asked for it. In the second, they said they had seen a TV show on
depression and wanted to know if a drug could help them. And in the final script
they didn't request anything specific.
Based on 298 visits to the offices of 152 doctors, between 2003 and 2004,
researchers found doctors most likely to write prescriptions when Paxil was
requested.
In those cases, doctors prescribed drugs in 53 per cent of cases, with 27 per
cent of those for Paxil. When patients made a more general request, however,
they walked away with drugs even more often: 76 per cent of the time.
Those who made no request were prescribed drugs in less than one-third of cases.
Among actors who pretended to be suffering an even less severe "adjustment
disorder" such as fatigue, stress or sleeplessness, the results were the
similar.
Antidepressants were prescribed 55 per cent of the time when Paxil was
mentioned, 39 per cent in instances of general requests and 10 per cent when no
drugs were mentioned at all.
According to the report's chief author, that is the most shocking finding.
"We were a bit startled to see the rather high levels of prescribing for
patients who made requests for medication in the adjustment disorder condition,
because clinical evidence suggests that the benefits of such medication in that
situation are really quite minimal," Richard Kravitz said.
Offering a Canadian perspective on the study, York university associate
professor Joel Lexchin says the study points to some of the risks associated
with drug advertising.
"One of the major risks is that most of the drugs that get this kind of direct
consumer advertising are new products," he told CTV's Canada AM on Wednesday.
"And new products are ones that we don't know a lot about their safety on."
In the U.S., drug companies spend $3.2 billion US every year advertising drugs
directly to consumers.
In addition to the ads for erectile dysfunction and allergy products familiar to
many TV viewers, arthritis drugs are among the most heavily advertised.
Considering the spate of recalls issued for prescription arthritis drugs,
Lexchin says consumers should be wary of what they're asking of their doctors,
and why.
"Or, you end up with problems we saw with Vioxx -- where lots of people got it
inappropriately," he said. "In the United States, it's estimated to have caused
between 80- and 100,000 excess cases of heart disease."
|