Amid ongoing concern over conflicts of interest that may affect medical practice, a new study found that 14% of $4.5 million paid to authors in two leading psychiatry journals were undisclosed and nearly all of the payments were made to researchers conducting randomized controlled trials for pharmaceuticals.
All totaled, $206,000 paid to American Journal of Psychiatry authors, or 7.5% of total payments, was not disclosed, while $439,000, or 25% of the payments made to contributors of the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry, were not disclosed. Total undisclosed payments among the top 10 highest-earning authors accounted for 85% and 99.6% of all payments that were not disclosed.
Among the authors who received undisclosed payments, 80% of the authors who contributed to JAMA Psychiatry and 36.3% of those who wrote for AJP received substantial undisclosed payments, which were defined as those exceeding $5,000, according to the National Institutes of Health threshold for a “significant financial interest.”
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