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Study Suggests Expensive Ads Sell Few Prescription Drugs

Posted on: Tuesday, 2 September 2008, 15:05 CDT

U.S. and Canadian researchers reported on Monday that expensive advertising of prescription drugs directly to consumers might do little to encourage sales.

Even though companies spent an estimated $3 billion in 2005 on such ads in the United States, they did not appear to result in more prescriptions, researchers said.

Most countries, besides the United States and New Zealand, ban direct advertising of prescription medications.

"People tend to think that if direct-to-consumer advertising wasn't effective, pharma wouldn't be doing it," Harvard Medical School's Stephen Soumerai said in a statement. "But as it turns out, decisions to market directly to consumers are based on scant data."

The Harvard and the University of Alberta teams set up an experiment using French-speaking Quebec residents as their "control" group.

The researchers reported in the British Medical Journal English that dominant Canadians see a great deal of U.S. advertising, but French-speaking Quebecois see far less and thus are less likely to be influenced.

Three drugs were looked at during the study: Enbrel, or etancercept, sold by Wyeth and Amgen to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions; Novartis AG's now-withdrawn irritable bowel drug Zelnorm; and the Nasonex allergy treatment made by ScheringPlough Corp.

These three drugs were on the market for at least a year before the ads started and none were advertised via legal "soft" ads in Canada that allow mention of the drug's name but not what it is for.

The team looked at prescription data from 2,700 pharmacies compiled by IMS Health Canada and found no difference in sales for Enbrel or Nasonex after the U.S. ads began.

They noticed a 40 percent increase in sales of Zelnorm in English-speaking Canada as soon as the U.S. ad campaign began -- a jump mirrored by U.S. sales. But after a few years sales flattened out, and the rise could have been because there were no alternatives for consumers, they said.

Soumerai said pharmaceuticals are not typical consumer products.

"A person needs to see an ad, get motivated by that ad, contact their doctor for an appointment, show up at the appointment, communicate both the condition and the drug to the doctor, convince the doctor that this drug is preferable to other alternatives, then actually go out and fill the prescription," he said.

He called it a “chain of events that can break at any point”.

Similar conclusions were found in nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation reports on direct-to-consumer ads.

The foundation found that 91 percent of adults surveyed had seen or heard advertisements for prescription drugs, but just one-third spoke to a doctor about a drug they saw advertised, and 54 percent of them got a prescription for a different drug.

Around 76 percent of doctors surveyed said they sometimes recommend a different prescription drug to a patient who mentions a drug ad and 5 percent said they frequently gave patients the drug.

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On the Net:

• Harvard Medical School
• University of Alberta
• British Medical Journal

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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