A doctor accused of faking research for a dozen years in published studies that suggested after-surgery benefits from painkillers including Vioxx and Celebrex pleaded guilty Monday to one count of federal health care fraud.
An attorney for Dr. Scott Reuben said the anesthesiologist will have to repay $361,932 in research grants and forfeit assets worth at least $50,000 as penalty for his conduct following a plea hearing in U.S. District Court.
Prosecutors alleged the former chief of acute pain at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield sought and received research grants from pharmaceutical companies but never performed the studies. They said he fabricated patient data and submitted information to anesthesiology journals that unwittingly published it.
Reuben, a 51-year-old Longmeadow resident, took leave after the hospital said last year that a routine review found that some of his research was not approved by an internal hospital review board. Further investigation found 21 papers published in anesthesiology journals between 1996 and 2008 in which Reuben made up some or all of the data, the hospital said.
The hospital asked the journals to retract the studies, some of which reported favorable results from painkillers including New York-based Pfizer Inc.'s Bextra, Celebrex and Lyrica and Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based Merck & Co. Inc.'s Vioxx. The studies also claimed Wyeth's antidepressant Effexor could be used as a painkiller. (Wyeth is now part of Pfizer.)
Vioxx and Bextra, among a class of painkillers known as Cox-2 inhibitors, were pulled from the market amid mounting evidence they raised the risk of heart attack, stroke and death. Celebrex is still on the market. Lyrica is a treatment for fibromyalgia, a syndrome characterized by chronic muscle pain and fatigue.
~ more... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment