Conflicts of Interest in Cardiology Journals

Background Conflicts of interest are an ongoing concern in medical research. This takes place when the sponsor reports positive findings or promotes products over competitors because of their relationship and interaction with their industry sponsors. The Physicians Payment Sunshine Act mandates physicians who receive payments/compensation disclose their current and past relationships with different medical companies and the products they produce as an aim to manage conflicts of interest. In this quantitative bioethics study, we quantified financial conflicts of interest among cardiology journal authors and evaluated disparities in industry support among female and male physician-authors. Methods We reviewed 966 authors from 147 empirical research articles from two cardiology journals, Circulation , JCR 2021 Impact Factor (IF)= 29.7 and Journal of the American College of Cardiology ( JACC ), IF= 24.1, and one cardiovascular subspecialty journal, Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions ( CCI ), IF= 2.7. Articles published between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020 were reviewed. The database, OpenPayments.cms.gov (CMS-OP) was used to search author physician’s payments who reported receiving general payments, research payments, associated research funding, and ownership and investment interest between 2017 and 2019. Results A total of 19,529 payments totaled to 69,591,343.18 USD within the 36-month disclosure window. JACC accounted for 51.90%, Circulation 30.59% and CCI 17.51% of the total payment amounts. Male physician authors were more likely to receive industry sponsorship than their female counterparts (χ 2 (1)= 23.30; p <0.00001). The 139 male physicians with CMS-OP accounts made up 90.23% of payments, while females accounted for 9.77%. Conclusion In conclusion, cardiology journal authors received appreciable renumeration form industry. Female cardiology authors had lower representation in authorship and honorarium compared to their male colleagues. There were also occasional author disclosure discrepancies, where some authors failed to report their relationship with financial institutions, despite each author receiving greater than one million dollars (USD) over a 36-month window. The evidence from this investigation supports that financial conflicts of interest is an ongoing issue in cardiology journals.