38% of U.S. Medical Schools Have Policies To Prevent Conflicts of Interest, Study Finds

Thirty-eight percent of U.S. medical schools have policies that seek to prevent conflicts of interest related to their financial relationships with pharmaceutical or medical device companies, according to a study published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Reuters reports. For the study, researchers led by Eric Campbell of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School in 2006 asked 125 medical schools about their policies and received 86 responses. According to the study, 37% of respondents said that they planned to draft such policies, and 25% said that they did not have such policies.

Campbell said, "Frankly, I'm a little surprised at the slow rate of uptake," adding, "It's somewhat shocking to me that they (the policies) don't exist more frequently." He added that the study did not determine whether medical schools did not have such policies because they sought to protect funds received from pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Such companies "cultivate deep financial relationships with medical schools" that, among "other things, ... conduct studies that may help win government approval for drugs that could generate billions of dollars in sales," Reuters reports (Dunham, Reuters, 2/12).