Failure to report financial interest from tobacco companies taints CT scan-lung cancer studies

2008-05-10T12:15:00-05:00

In an April editorial, "Smoke, then Fire: Lung Cancer Screening Studies Under Further Scrutiny" The Oncologist journal summarizes the unraveling of a hidden agenda by a cigarette manufacturer: Make it appear that CT screeningcan prevent death from lung cancer.

Lung cancer screening articles by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers Claudia Henschke and David Yankelevitz have appeared in the peer-reviewed New England Journalof Medicine (NEJM), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Oncologist and elsewhere.The source of their funding was not revealed to the journals until stories appeared in The Cancer Letter and the New York Times.

^{In The Oncologist's words:}

"Henschke and Yankelevitz financed some of their lung cancerscreening work with a $3.6 million grant from Vector, the parentcompany of the Liggett Group, a major cigarette manufacturer.The tobacco money was filtered through a nonprofit foundation,the Foundation for Lung Cancer Early Detection, Prevention &Treatment, that was hastily established in late 2000. Henschke,Yankelevitz, Antonio Gotto (dean of Weill Cornell Medical Collegeand a noted cardiology researcher), and Arthur Mahon (chairof the Weill Cornell Board of Overseers) are the foundation'sofficers and directors. The foundation's support was acknowledgedin a few articles published by these authors, but the originof the money was not obvious to the journals, as recently observedby Jeffrey Drazen, the editor-in-chief of the NEJM [6]. Goldbergfurther documents that the authors subsequently accepted grantsupport from the American Cancer Society and other sources thatspecifically prohibit projects that receive funding from tobaccocompanies. In fact, the authors neither acknowledged this fundingfrom Vector nor their foundation in the paper published by TheOncologist [7].

Thus, smoke revealed the underlying fire. Clearly, tobacco companiescan exploit the Henschke-Yankelevitz message that CT screeningcan prevent death from lung cancer. The subliminal message follows:"All a tobacco smoker has to do is get a CT every few years."Disclosure of the real source of their funding would not onlyhave been relevant, it could likely have prevented publicationof these controversial results in any major journal. Had theeditors of The Oncologist known about this, we would not haveaccepted the article, and we state unequivocally that this Journalwill not knowingly publish articles from authors supported bytobacco money, whether that money is laundered through a foundationor given directly to the investigators. Our disclosure formsthat must be submitted prior to publication of any new articlewith or without CME will so state.^"

Henschke and Yankelevitz also failed to report their financial interest, in the form of held patents, for CT software used to evaluate lung screening films and for a needleused to biopsy lung nodules when submitting a separate article for publication in The Oncologist. According to an article in The Oncologist's February issue, "They asserted that,because this technology was never explicitly mentioned in theirarticle, they had no obligation to disclose these interests."

Flesh and Stone

Failure to report financial interest from tobacco companies taints CT scan-lung cancer studies