Adriane Fugh Berman of Georgetown University in D.C. examined the Wyeth Ghostwriting Archive – a collection of documents uncovered during recent litigation brought against Wyeth (now owned by Pfizer) by thousands of women who developed breast cancer while taking hormones manufactured by the company. PLoS Medicine and The New York Times intervened in this litigation, which resulted in 1500 documents being unsealed and thus available for scrutiny by the public, journalists, and academics.
This is the first academic analysis of the documents. Dr Fugh Berman found that Wyeth worked with a medical communication company called DesignWrite to produce ghostwritten reviews and commentaries that were then placed in medical journals and journal supplements to over-promote the benefits and downplay the harms of their menopausal hormone therapy. The article is at:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000335