Sen. Grassley Nails Yet Another Psych Researcher

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has nailed yet another university and yet another psych researcher for underreporting of monies received from a pharma company. This time out its the University of Texas and Karen Wagner, a psychiatry professor at UT-Galveston.

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Some major universities are reviewing the way they handle funding from drug companies in the wake of criticism from Sen. Chuck Grassley, who is pressing the federal agency that controls government health-research money to get tougher on universities that don't disclose ties to the industry.

"Late Tuesday, Mr. Grassley (R., Iowa) fired the latest salvo, stating in a letter that a researcher for the University of Texas who worked on a National Institutes of Health study involving the GlaxoSmithKline PLC antidepressant Paxil did not disclose more than $150,000 in consulting and speaking fees paid to her by the company. Mr. Grassley has raised similar criticism of other universities, including Stanford, Harvard and University of Cincinnati."

Among other things, Wagner is one of the co-authors of the infamous and much-discredited Paxil Study 329, which claimed that Paxil was efficacious and safe in treating depression in adolescents when in fact the study's stats had been so jury-rigged that, in actuality, the drug hadn't beaten placebo and cases of suicidality encountered in the underlying clinical trial went unreported.

Ironically, Wagner did her child psychiatry residency at Harvard's McLean Hospital. Birds of a feather apparently underreporting pharma money together.

Good for Sen. Grassley and his Senate Finance Committee staff for continuing to press forward on this front. I've written about other efforts by the Senator to clean up psych research here.

And for those of you who are newbies to the Study 329 story, Healthy Skepticism has the background here.