Thanksgiving edition: conflicts of interest and cholesterol

For millions of individuals (including me) Thanksgiving is not only a time for giving thanks but also for thinking about cholesterol.  And  if guidelines recently issued by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology are followed, the number of us who use  statins – cholesterol reducing drugs – will increase substantially, as described in this piece from Forbes.   But as described in this piece in Time (and also in the Forbes article) “the chair of the panel responsible for the new advice, which many see as favorable to … statins, had previous ties to a number of drug makers that manufacture those very same medications,” as did six of the other fourteen members of the panel.

I should add that the financial ties were duly disclosed and applicable guidelines (issued by the Institute of Medicine) were complied with, in that the guidelines do not prohibit any such COIs – only COIs by a majority of members of a panel.  Still, one cannot help feel uneasy about this situation for several reasons.

First, with respect to the panel’s report, one should not assume that disclosure cures the COI.  Indeed, as described in earlier posts in this blog, behavioral ethics experiments have shown just the opposite – that disclosure may “license” conflicts-inspired decision making.

Second, it is not clear to what extent the disclosures here are sufficiently processed.  As described in this article in MedPage Today by a faculty member at Harvard Medical School: “[A]midst all the late-breaking clinical trial presentations and ask-the-expert sessions, what I didn’t hear were the speakers’ financial conflicts of interest. Don’t get me wrong — the AHA mandates that all speakers present a disclosure slide at the beginning of every talk, and this rule was reliably followed by all presenters … in the following manner: ‘Here are my disclosures’ — PowerPoint slide flashes on screen with a list of pharmaceutical/device companies. Yet, by the time the speaker finishes speaking those four words, the slide deck has already advanced to the next slide. I, and my fellow audience members, didn’t even have enough time to read the disclosures, let alone process them.”

Finally, and on a broader level, COIs of this sort could have a more pernicious effect beyond directly impacting the patients involved, because of the great extent to which health-care costs are borne by the country as a whole.  As discussed in this recent post:

–          there are certain challenges (such as climate change and public debt) that both pose great risks to society as a whole and will require broad-based sacrifice to successfully address; and

–          COIs can imperil the likelihood that all relevant parties will be willing to make such sacrifices.

Health care costs fit into this category, too, and, like the others, key players in these areas have, in my view, a higher (i.e., “Caesar’s wife”) duty when it comes to addressing COIs ethically.