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You might recall a big medical news – the painkiller Vioxx, a drug used by about 20 million Americans at the time, was pulled from shelves by its manufacturer after it became clear that it posed a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than previously reported. The manufacturer, Merck, now faces more than 10,000 lawsuits over the drug. But as today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports, far less attention has been paid to the role that the oft-cited and highly respected New England Journal of Medicine played in the matter:

“While Merck has taken the brunt of criticism in the affair, the New England Journal's role in the Vioxx debacle has received little attention. The journal is the most-cited medical publication in the world, and its November 2000 article on Vioxx was a major marketing tool for Merck.

Last December, the journal repudiated the Vioxx article in an ‘expression of concern,’ but only after the drug had been recalled and more than five years after the article appeared. Had the journal acted before the recall, its authoritative voice almost certainly would have damped the Vioxx boom.”

The Journal takes an exhaustive look at NEJM’s missteps as well as the broader implications of such practices among medical journals in general. One doctor told the Journal that while NEJM should be praised for eventually issuing doubts about the article, they should have corrected it far sooner: “Had it acted earlier, he says, sales of Vioxx, ‘would have been killed.’”

We’ve touched on this issue before, since medical reporting relies heavily on the content of journals like NEJM, and the potential that the data within them is misleading means reporting on it will require a lot more skepticism.

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