Merck's Deleted Data
Robert Langreth and Matthew Herper
Forbes.com 12.08.05, 8:10 PM ET

"A top editor of The New England Journal of Medicine says that he was stunned to find out that data linking Vioxx to cardiovascular risk was deleted from a major study his journal published five years ago--and that it appears that Merck researchers may have deleted that data." (from the first paragraph)

According to the article, shortly after Merck recalled Vioxx from the market the editors of NEJM discovered a diskette containing earlier versions of the manuscript for the VIGOR trail published in NEJM November 2000. The early versions fo the manuscript contained a blank table entitled "CV events." Time stamps indicaed the data was deleted two days before the manuscript was submitted to NEJM. According to the Dr. Gregory Curfman, executive editor of NEJM, the identity of the person who deleted the table is a mystery. "When you hover the cursor over the editing changes, the identity of the editor pops up, and it just says 'Merck."

The eidtors of NEJM released an editorial on The New England Journal's Web site entitled "Expression of Concern," (10.1056/NEJMe058314)which calls on the VIGOR authors to submit a correction of the 2000 manuscript. "Taken together, these inaccuracies and deletions call into question the integrity of the data on adverse cardiovascular events in this article," it read.

Since I don't write journal articles from research funded by drug companies I am completely naive as to how this works. Must authors submit their research articles to the drug company first prior to submitting it to a journal publisher? That seems a little off to me. But if that is the case, I don't understand how the authors upon reading the final published article in NEJM did not notice that one of their tables on cardiovascular events was missing and contact the journal.