A Boston researcher is demanding a medical journal retract a study that suggests testosterone therapy comes with heart risks — a move that one pharmacy industry critic says reflects a growing trend of doctors who work with drug companies combating negative findings.
Dr. Abraham Morgentaler of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and other men's health experts around the world are demanding the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) retract a study they say used faulty numbers about testosterone therapy — a treatment for a range of ailments such as fatigue and erectile dysfunction.
JAMA, which has already corrected the article twice, did not respond to the Herald yesterday. The study's authors could not be reached. The article says that among two large groups of Veterans Administration heart patients with low testosterone, the incidence of heart attack and stroke was less than 20 percent in the no-testosterone therapy group, and nearly 26 percent in the testosterone therapy group.
"This has taken me by surprise. Everybody in the field was scratching their heads," said Morgentaler, who submitted a petition questioning the study's statistical analysis.
There has been a rise in both calls for retractions and actual retractions in medical journals in recent years, observers told the Herald.
"There were 10 times as many retractions in 2010 as there were in 2001," said Ivan Oransky, cofounder of the site RetractionWatch.com. "We have been seeing more retractions, and we're not sure why."
Retractions of medical articles, which generally involve fraud or misconduct, still represent less than 1 percent of all the papers published.
Meanwhile, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, director of the PharmedOut project at Georgetown University Medical Center, said she believes the pharmaceutical industry has upped its demands for retractions as a defensive measure to protect products.
"There's definitely been a rise in calls for retractions. This is an intimidation tactic from industry, using third-party experts," Fugh-Berman said.
Fugh-Berman works as a paid witness in litigation involving drug company marketing. According to a ProPublica database that tracks drug company contributions to doctors, Morgentaler has received payments from pharmaceutical company giants Merck and Eli Lilly, which both sell testosterone products.
"This smells like industry influence," Fugh-Berman said of Morgentaler's retraction demand.
Morgentaler called that a "naive" argument and said he is concerned only with what he considers sloppy science in the JAMA article.
"If I give a talk to a group, they pay me for my time and my expertise," he said. "Do I gain anything if the companies sell more testosterone? No."
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