Accepting just one pharmaceutical industry-sponsored meal was associated with higher rates of prescribing certain medications to Medicare patients among physicians, according to a recent study published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.
Furthermore, the study found that accepting a greater number of meals and more expensive meals were associated with even greater increases in prescribing.
Critics of industry-sponsored meals for physicians say the meals may influence providers to prescribe more expensive brand name drugs, while supporters of the practice say the meals and payment help facilitate discussion of novel treatments.
R. Adams Dudley, MD, of UC San Francisco, and his coauthors linked to two national data sets to quantify the association between industry payments and physician prescribing patterns. According to the study, 279,669 physicians received 63,524 payments associated with four target drugs, with 95 percent of those payments coming in the form of meals valued at less than $20 on average.
Physicians who received meals related to the targeted drugs on four or more days per year prescribed the drugs 1.8 to 5.4 times more than physicians who did not receive industry-sponsored meals. Physicians who only received one meal promoting the four target drugs also prescribed them at higher rates than those who did not receive any.
The physicians who received the highest proportions of industry-sponsored meals included male physicians, solo practitioners and physicians who practiced in the South, according to the report.
The authors note the results are cross-sectional and merely present an association, not cause and effect.