Transparency around potential conflicts of interest is lacking among editorial board members of top medical imaging journals, according to new research published Tuesday in Radiology.
Such publications play a powerful role in influencing the specialty but are susceptible to industry influence that can harm patient care and damage medical literature’s credibility, experts noted. To better understand this issue, Dutch researchers pinpointed physician editorial board members from 15 of the top U.S. imaging journals and analyzed corresponding data from the Open Payments database.
Out of 519 individuals included in the study, 41% had received industry payments, ranging anywhere from $13 to nearly $405,000. Financial conflict of interest disclosures were not available for 80% of editorial board members in the study, with nearly 41% of those individual (169/413) receiving industry payments.
“Failure and inaccurate reporting of [conflicts of interest] on journals’ websites were relatively frequent according to our findings, which may undermine the fairness of the peer-review process and erode confidence in the integrity of the radiology literature,” Robert Kwee, MD, PhD, with the Department of Radiology at Zuyderland Medical Center in Heerlen, the Netherlands, wrote Jan. 25. “This could be improved by regularly reminding editorial board members of their responsibility and by taking regular samples.”
Kwee et al. tapped the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services national disclosure program for the study, targeting the year 2020. The median industry payment received by physicians was about $2,400, with the majority of money going toward consulting work (59%). Members from two journals—JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging and the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology—received much higher payments compared to most others. And out of the 106 individuals (20%) whose conflict-of-interest disclosures were made public, 34% did not match up with Open Payments data.
“Financial COIs among journal editorial boards cannot always be avoided, and they should not pose a problem if managed appropriately,” Kwee and his co-author wrote. “Appropriate management may consist of withholding editorial board members from reviewing and deciding on the appropriateness of publication of scientific manuscripts, the contents of which may interfere with the interests of any industrial partners from which they receive money or other direct or indirect benefits.”
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.