Medical publisher Elsevier has agreed to investigate allegations by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that one of its journals published an article ghostwritten by a pharmaceutical company promoting its product. Sen. Grassley has challenged the impartiality of a May 2003 article appearing in the publisher's American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology which he says is favorable to drugs made by Wyeth.

Grassley says the article, which was signed by Australian academic Dr. John Eden, was ghostwritten by a firm called DesignWrite, after which Wyeth found Eden to put his name on the content. The article, which was published more than a year after a landmark federal study linked Wyeth's Prempro hormone treatment to women's breast cancers, argued that there was "no definitive evidence" of this link.

Wyeth, for its part, said that the academic authors had "substantive editorial control" of the articles and weren't paid for their contributions.

To learn more about the controversy:
- read this piece [1] in The New York Times

Related Articles:
Study: Academic medical centers have easier time with conflict-of-interest policies [2]
JAMA: Merck paid docs for bylines [3]
Ghostwriting fuels foes of FDA rule change [4]