SAN DIEGO – Authors of endoscopy clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) received many more payments from industry than they disclosed, according to a new review of publicly available data.
Dr. Samir Grover
Additionally, many of the payments came from pharmaceutical companies or medical device manufacturers whose products were directly related to the practice guideline topic at hand, said Amir Rumann, MD, and coauthors, who presented their findings in a poster session at the annual Digestive Disease Week®.
The researchers found that, of 581 authors listed in 38 CPGs, 127 had initially disclosed payments when the guidelines were published. A search of the federal Open Payments database, however, found that 452 of these authors had payments that they did not disclose in the CPG publication process.
For authors with undisclosed payments, the median value of the total undisclosed amounts was $2,445, from a median of 2.5 unique companies, according to records maintained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The interquartile range for payments was $167-$10,380.
“There is a high burden of undisclosed payments by pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to authors of endoscopy guidelines in the United States,” wrote Dr. Rumman and coauthors at the University of Toronto, where Dr. Rumann is a gastroenterology resident.
Of the authors who disclosed payments, 20 (16%) disclosed payments from sources directly related to the CPG in the publication. But the Open Payments database search yielded 314 (54%) disclosed payments that were judged directly related to the CPG topic at hand.
Of the 38 CPGs included in the analysis, 24 were from the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE), and 4 were from the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA). According to the analysis performed by Dr. Rumman and his coauthors, 23 of these guidelines adhered to standards proposed by the National Academy of Medicine for development of “trustworthy” CPGs.
