Review articles and commentaries that were ghostwritten overstated the benefits of hormone replacement therapy and downplayed its harms, says an analysis published in PLoS Medicine (2010;7(9):e1000335, doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000335).

The finding is from an analysis of 1500 documents unsealed in recent litigation against the giant drug company Wyeth (now part of Pfizer) that looked at how drug companies use ghostwriters to insert marketing messages into articles published in medical journals.

Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor in the department of physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC, who led the analysis, calls on the medical profession to take action to prevent the “unscrupulous relationships” between the industry and …