• New England Journal of Medicine, Thursday, August 16, 2007 10:30 AM

Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs boosts sales and can help prevent underuse of prescribed medicines -- but it can also lead to overuse, according to a new study. Concerns about DTC ads have grown with the withdrawal from the market of some heavily touted drugs later found to carry major health risks, while the Food and Drug Administration has been attacked for lax enforcement of laws that regulate the ads.

Total spending on pharmaceutical promotion jumped from $11.4 billion in 1996 to $29.9 billion in 2005. While ad spending soared 330%, it only made up 14% of total expenditures by the end of the same period. But the number of letters sent by the FDA to manufacturers about violations of drug-ad rules fell from 142 in 1997 to just 21 last year. The study concludes that as spending on DTC has continued to rise -- in spite of all the problems associated with it -- "our findings suggest that calls for a moratorium on such advertising for new drugs would represent a dramatic departure from current practices."

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