Leaked Avandia paper didn’t fall victim to the Ingelfinger Rule after all

By now, you will have no doubt read about the study published online in JAMA earlier this week showing that people taking Avandia (rosiglitazone) had a higher rate of stroke, heart failure, and death than those taking pioglitazone (Actos). (The study, like the one I blogged about yesterday, was published while I was on vacation.)

An earlier version of this manuscript, leaked to Ed Silverman’s Pharmalot blog, was the subject of an Embargo Watch post two weeks ago. In my last post, I wondered whether the Ingelfinger Rule — read this for background — applies if the author didn’t seek any attention himself. Apparently not, according to a story on the new study by heartwire:

Yup, GMA did break that JAMA postpartum depression in men study embargo

Yesterday, I asked whether  an ABC Good Morning America story on men developing postpartum depression, posted about 9 a.m. Eastern, had broken a JAMA embargo.

The answer is yes, according to an email just sent out by JAMA’s director of media relations, Jann Ingmire:

The ABC-TV program, “Good Morning America” broke the JAMA embargo yesterday morning (May 18) by promoting a study that was to be released later in the day. I contacted the producers at GMA who told me that their story on depression and new fathers had been finished weeks ahead of this airing and they were just using the JAMA study as a “hook” to finally run it. The story did not contain any data from the study. They also claimed to be unaware that it is a violation of our embargo policy to promote a JAMA study before publication. It is.

Break a JAMA embargo, get blacklisted. Then what?

Adam Feuerstein and Patricia Anstett are part of an elite journalism club.

They’ve both been blacklisted by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), accused of breaking embargoes.

That means the journal will no longer send either of them embargoed material. How did they earn such a punishment, and what effect has it had on their reporting? I caught up with both of them yesterday to find out.

Pat, who has covered medicine for decades for the Detroit Free Press, lost her JAMA press privileges — she prefers not to use the word “blacklist” — in 2002 when she reported that the Women’s Health Initiative had found risks to using hormone replacement therapy (HRT), before the study embargo lifted.

Here’s Pat’s version of events: “We didn’t break the embargo,” she told me by email. “A good source told me there was a huge sea-change announcement coming on HRT so I spent time, starting about six weeks prior to the announcement, talking to doctors who indeed were changing their HRT practices. JAMA’s editor and NIH chiefs sat on this very important news for several months, allowing them ample time to schedule a press conference at their convenience. They gave the news exclusively to a TV network several hours BEFORE the press briefing and their own embargo time for the rest of the media.”

JAMA didn’t see things Pat’s way, told her she had broken the embargo, and revoked her press privileges.

What Pat found most outrageous: