Prescription drug advertisements should include "fact boxes" to help consumers make informed decisions about their medications, according to a study by three Dartmouth Medical School professors published online Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The drug facts boxes would give consumers concise, quantitative data about how a drug works, and its harms and benefits, in a more simplified format than is currently provided in fine print.
"It's the first time [consumers] will get clarity about the effectiveness of various drugs," DMS professor H. Gilbert Welch, one of the study's author, said. "The [Food and Drug Administration] has always required that people get the information of the side effects, but there is never information provided about how the drugs work."
Welch, along with DMS professors Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin, showed study participants fake advertisements for two different drugs. Participants were also shown two different versions of the advertisements. The first version was a conventional advertisement with the drug facts in fine print, while the second provided quantitative information in a table.
With the standard direct-to-consumer advertisements, only 30 percent of people chose the correct drug for their medical needs. With the drug facts box, approximately 70 percent of people chose the right drug, Woloshin said.
These results suggest that drug facts boxes help individuals make informed, accurate decisions about their medications, Welch said.
"There's been a lot of hesitancy to give people numbers about how well things work," Welch said. "Instead, people get vague statements. The belief is that people can't deal with numbers. What we've shown is that they can, they like it, and that it affects their decision making."
Woloshin said he and his co-authors hope the study's results will motivate the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to require that drug advertisements include drug facts boxes.
Woloshin said they plan to present their data to representatives from the FDA Risk Advisory Committee on Feb. 28 and 29.
The drug facts box was originally inspired by the nutrition facts panel on cereal boxes, Welch said.
"So it's the same idea, but for drugs," Welch said. "It gives you some idea for how the drugs work."
The professors also wanted to give consumers an alternative to the fine print used in current direct-to-consumer advertisements, which they said often do not provide the fundamental information customers need to make informed decisions.
"The direct-to-consumer drug ads contain no quantitative information about how the drug works," Welch said. "It [tells] you, probably in an exaggerated sense, that the drug helps people."
Schwartz and Woloshin attributed much of the study's success to DMS.
"Lisa Schwartz and I went to the graduate program at the Dartmouth Institute [for Health Policy and Clinical Practice], so a lot of our training is from Dartmouth," Woloshin said. "So in some ways, we couldn't have done the studies if we hadn't been here."
Woloshin, Schwartz and Welch conducted the survey from October 2006 to April 2007.
Schwartz was unavailable for comment by press time.
