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Compliance of disease awareness campaigns in printed Dutch media with national and international regulatory guidelines.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:The European legislation prohibits prescription-only medicines' advertising but allows pharmaceutical companies to provide information to the public on health and diseases, provided there is no direct or indirect reference to a pharmaceutical product. Various forms of promotion have become increasingly common in Europe including "disease-oriented" campaigns. OBJECTIVES:To explore examples of disease awareness campaigns by pharmaceutical companies in the Netherlands, by assessing their compliance with the World Health Organization (WHO) Ethical Criteria for medicinal drug promotion and the Dutch guidelines for provision of information by pharmaceutical companies. METHODS:Materials referring to health/disease and treatments published in the most widely circulated newspapers and magazines were collected from March to May 2012. An evaluation tool was developed based on relevant underlying principles from the WHO ethical criteria and Dutch self-regulation guidelines. Collected disease awareness advertisements were used to pilot the evaluation tool and to explore the consistency of information provided with the WHO and Dutch criteria. FINDINGS:Eighty materials met our inclusion criteria; 71 were published in newspapers and 9 in magazines. The large majority were news items but 21 were disease awareness advertisements, of which 5 were duplicates. Fifteen out of the 16 disease awareness campaigns were non-compliant with current guidelines mainly due to lack of balance (n = 12), absence of listed author and/or sponsor (n = 8), use of misleading or incomplete information (n = 5) and use of promotional information (n = 5). None mentioned a pharmaceutical product directly. CONCLUSION:Disease Awareness Campaigns are present in Dutch printed media. Although no brand names were mentioned, the lack of compliance of disease awareness campaigns with the current regulations is alarming. There were information deficiencies and evidence of information bias. A key concern is that the context in which the information is provided, mostly through indirect referral, is likely to support treatment with the sponsor's product.

SUBMITTER: Leonardo Alves T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4157805 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:As public discourse continues to progress online, it is important for mental health advocates, public health officials, and other curious parties and stakeholders, ranging from researchers, to those affected by the issue, to be aware of the advancing new mediums in which the public can share content ranging from useful resources and self-help tips to personal struggles with respect to both illness and its stigmatization. A better understanding of this new public discourse on mental health, often framed as social media campaigns, can help perpetuate the allocation of sparse mental health resources, the need for educational awareness, and the usefulness of community, with an opportunity to reach those seeking help at the right moment. The objective of this study was to understand the nature of and engagement around mental health content shared on mental health campaigns, specifically #MyTipsForMentalHealth on Twitter around World Mental Health Awareness Day in 2017. We collected 14,217 Twitter posts from 10,805 unique users between September and October 2017 that contained the hashtag #MyTipsForMentalHealth. With the involvement of domain experts, we hand-labeled 700 posts and categorized them as (a) Fact, (b) Stigmatizing, (c) Inspirational, (d) Medical/Clinical Tip, (e) Resource Related, (f) Lifestyle or Social Tip or Personal View, and (g) Off Topic. After creating a "seed" machine learning classifier, we used both unsupervised and semi supervised methods to classify posts into the various expert identified topical categories. We also performed a content analysis to understand how information on different topics spread through social networks. Our support vector machine classification algorithm achieved a mean cross-validation accuracy of 0.81 and accuracy of 0.64 on unseen data. We found that inspirational Twitter posts were the most spread with a mean of 4.17 retweets, and stigmatizing content was second with a mean of 3.66 retweets. Classification of social media-related mental health interactions offers valuable insights on public sentiment as well as a window into the evolving world of online self-help and the varied resources within. Our results suggest an important role for social media-based peer support to not only guide information seekers to useful content and local resources but also illuminate the socially-insular aspects of stigmatization. However, our results also reflect the challenges of quantifying the heterogeneity of mental health content on social media and the need for novel machine learning methods customized to the challenges of the field.

Project description:BackgroundEuropean legislation prohibits direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicines, but allows drug manufacturers to provide information to the public on health and diseases. Our aim was to measure the frequency of disease awareness campaigns in Latvian media and assess their compliance with international and European standards.MethodsMaterials on health/disease and treatments were collected between April and September 2015 from 12 newspapers and magazines and six online portals. Disease awareness campaigns were assessed using a previously developed instrument based on the WHO Ethical Criteria for Medicinal Drug promotion and European standards (EU law and pharmaceutical industry self-regulatory guidelines). Collected materials were used to examine the information provided on medical conditions and their diagnosis and treatment. The inter-rater reliability was calculated.ResultsWe collected 263 materials from print (n = 149) and online media (n = 114); 94 were news items and 169 were disease-awareness advertisements. Cancer, cardiovascular problems, allergies and respiratory diseases were common topics. Of the 157 campaigns assessed, non-compliance was identified in 149 cases (inter-rater reliability 90%), mainly due to misleading or incomplete information, lack of balance and the absence of a listed author/sponsor. Six disease awareness campaigns directly mentioned a pharmaceutical product by brand name and other four included the logo or name of a manufacturer, referred to a condition and indirectly mentioned a treatment, all in contravention with European law.ConclusionsThe compliance of disease awareness campaigns in Latvian media with international and European standards is low. This raises concerns about the nature of information being conveyed. Through lack of balance, missing sponsorship information, and misleading or incomplete information, these campaigns could contribute to inaccurate self-diagnosis and generate demand among those who might not need medical treatment.

Project description:ObjectivesTo investigate authors' awareness and use of authorship guidelines, and to assess their perceptions of the fairness of authorship decisions.DesignA cross-sectional online survey.Setting and participantsCorresponding authors of research papers submitted in 2014 to 18 BMJ journals.Results3859/12 646 (31%) researchers responded. They worked in 93 countries and varied in research experience. Of these, 1326 (34%) reported their institution had an authorship policy providing criteria for authorship; 2871 (74%) were 'very familiar' with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' authorship criteria and 3358 (87%) reported that guidelines were beneficial when preparing manuscripts. Furthermore, 2609 (68%) reported that their use was 'sometimes' or 'frequently' encouraged in their research setting. However, 2859 respondents (74%) reported that they had been involved in a study at least once where someone was added as an author who had not contributed substantially (honorary authorship), and 1305 (34%) where someone was not listed as an author but had contributed substantially (ghost authorship). Only 740 (19%) reported that they had never experienced either honorary or ghost authorship; 1115 (29%) reported that they had experienced both at least once. There was no clear pattern in experience of authorship misappropriation by continent. For their last coauthored article, 2187 (57%) reported that explicit authorship criteria had been used to determine eligibility, and 3088 (80%) felt that the decision made was fair. When institutions frequently encouraged use of authorship guidelines, authorship eligibility was more likely to be discussed early (817 of 1410, 58%) and perceived as fairer (1273 of 1410, 90%) compared with infrequent encouragement (974 of 2449, 40%, and 1891 of 2449, 74%).ConclusionsDespite a high level of awareness of authorship guidelines and criteria, these are not so widely used; more explicit encouragement of their use by institutions may result in more favourable use of guidelines by authors.

Project description:BackgroundDiabetes is among the most common chronic conditions people live with across the world. While it can be managed to a substantial degree, it can result in significant complications. As such, easy access to accurate tools to aid diabetes management is useful in minimizing these complications. Mobile apps are highly accessible and widely used, but there is a gap in the literature examining their compliance with medical guidelines.ObjectiveThe aims of this study are to develop the Analysis of Diabetes Apps (ADA) checklist to evaluate apps' compliance to guidelines set by the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) on the treatment and management of type 2 diabetes; to assess type 2 diabetes apps in the Apple App Store and the Android Google Play Store, and their compliance with international guidelines using the ADA framework; and to compare the novel ADA checklist against both the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS) tool kit and app ratings for each store.MethodsWe will develop a checklist based on the "IDF Clinical Practice Recommendations for Managing Type 2 Diabetes in Primary Care." Type 2 diabetes apps will be scraped from 6 countries' app stores using web scraping tools. These countries include Australia, Brazil, India, Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which were selected based on the largest population of English-speaking people in each continent. The apps will be searched on the web-based scraper using the search terms "blood sugar," "diabetes," "glucose level," "insulin," "sugar level," and "type 2 diabetes." Apps will be excluded if they are paid or are not in English. The apps will be assessed using the ADA checklist to evaluate their compliance to the international diabetes guidelines. Once scored, the results will be analyzed with descriptive statistics. The most popular apps will be further analyzed using the MARS tool kit. The ADA checklist scores will then be compared to both the MARS tool kit score and app ratings for each store.ResultsThe ADA checklist developed based on the IDF guidelines focuses on general information, risk factors, diagnosis, pharmacology, lifestyle modification, glycemic recommendations, and medications. The initial stress testing of the protocol resulted in 173 included apps. This will vary in the final search as the app stores are constantly changing.ConclusionsThe protocol presents the development of a checklist to investigate the compliance of type 2 diabetes apps with international guidelines. The checklist will hopefully form the basis of a scoring system for future research on compliance of mobile apps with international guidelines. High standardization of the ADA checklist will make it a robust tool for people with diabetes and their health care providers alike in assessing type 2 diabetes apps in the future.International registered report identifier (irrid)PRR1-10.2196/48781.

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Compliance of disease awareness campaigns in printed Dutch media with national and international regulatory guidelines.

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