New York, NY - The American Society of Thoracic Surgery has approved changes to the editorial policy of its journal that would temporarily "blacklist" authors who do not adequately declare their conflicts of interest (COIs), according to a story in the December 28, 2005 issue of the Wall Street Journal [1].

The decision comes after the editors of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery learned that the authors of two studies published this year didn't disclose in their papers their financial ties to AtriCure Inc, a company that makes a device used to deliver soft-tissue ablation during surgery. The device is also used during (but is not FDA approved for) the treatment of atrial fibrillation.

The story is the latest in a series of articles by reporter David Armstrong examining physician conflicts of interest and in particular those who had held stock in AtriCure or who were paid consultants as well as published investigators of the company's products. The Cleveland Clinic itself, where some of the authors practice, also had a financial stake in AtriCure, as previously reported by Armstrong.

According to the Wall Street Journal story, Dr Andrew Wechsler, editor of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, says the medical journal will issue corrections explaining the conflicts of interest of the authors of the two studies, but that this does not go "far enough."

A third study about the AtriCure procedure, published in October 2004, also failed to disclose the financial ties of at least two of the authors, but in this case, these authors—Drs Richard Schuessler and Ralph Damiano (Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO)—had acknowledged that they were paid consultants, but the journal had not included their disclosures at the time of publication.

The Wall Street Journal article notes that neither the Journal of the American Medical Association nor the New England Journal of Medicine have similar blacklist policies but quotes JAMA editor Dr Catherine DeAngelis as calling the surgery journal's new policy "pretty severe, but not outlandish." At JAMA, she told the Wall Street Journal, "authors who fail to disclose relationships are not barred from publication, but their work receives extra scrutiny."

The New England Journal of Medicine is likewise quoted saying it has "not had occasion to penalize an author for failure to disclose a conflict of interest in recent years" but that it would deal with future failures to acknowledge COIs on a "case-by-case basis."