Author Archives: Chase Scheinbaum

Fake Meg Ryan ad sheds light on celeb drug endorsements

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Adam Levine, frontman of the rock band Maroon 5, has ADHD—a fact he states in awareness ads sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Shire that are sometimes paired with the NBC show “The Voice”, on which he is a judge. Shire is the maker of the ADHD drugs Intuniv (guanfacine) and Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Aided by Levine’s star power (and that of his golden retriever Frankie, who cameos in the spot), Vyvanse is likely to pull in $1 billion this year.

The ad makes Levine the latest in a long line of celebrities who have been on the payroll of pharmaceuticals and appeared in ads. The list famously includes Paula Deen, Bob Dole and Sally Field. Even Larry the Cable—and Prilosec—Guy has gotten in on the action.

In general, consumer pharmaceutical ads (the kind featuring beaming and healthy but unknown faces) are as effective at boosting sales as they are at attracting vitriol. To critics, the use of celebrities only serves to make drug ads more galling. Just look at the Congressional probes, media criticism and other embarrassments they have spurred. But every time the subject bubbles up again (thanks Adam and Frankie!) it seems that one question—having nothing to do with taste or ethics—is overlooked: do celebrities add potency to drug ads?

Well, in March, Health Marketing Quarterly published a study focused on that very question. While the research looks only at print ads, and does not consider the seemingly ubiquitous television counterpart to them (we are looking at you, Sally Field) it provides some interesting data. The researchers created two types of ads for a fictitious antihistamine, unimaginatively dubbed ‘Allergone’. One depicted actress Meg Ryan. The other featured a non-celebrity. They asked 482 adults what they thought. In short, they found, “no significant difference in credibility and effectiveness” between the two ads. So, celebrities may not be very convincing salespeople when it comes to drugs, according to the researchers, lead by Nilesh Bhutada, a pharmacy care administrator at California Northstate University College of Pharmacy in Rancho Cordova, California.

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Key to suicide prevention may lie in subgroup analysis

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If efforts to prevent suicide—a cause of death that takes nearly 1 million lives each year worldwide—are going to be effective, experts may have to look beneath national rates.

Country averages belie the fact that suicide rates often vary widely among socioeconomic and regional subgroups. That revelation comes from an expansive collection of articles, published yesterday in the Lancet, some of which dig into decades worth of data for a deeper understanding of what they call a badly understood, underreported problem.

In Australia, for example, as the nationwide suicide rate fell from 40 per 100,000 in 1997 and 1998, to 20 per 100,000 in 2003, it was rising among young men living in rural and isolated areas, Alexandra Pitman, a population health scientist at University College London, and her colleagues point out in their paper. “If you just looked at the national rates, you would be ignoring a big problem,” she says. “Such complexity in national and international patterns,” Pitman adds, means that “each country is forced to take a fine-grained approach to preventing [suicide].”

A similar urban-rural discrepancy occurred in India, according to a study lead by Prabhat Jha, a public health researcher at the University of Toronto, Canada. During 2010, the rate of suicide in rural areas was 20.4 per 100,000, nearly twice that seen in cities, a rate of 12.0 per 100,000. The paper suggests that the higher suicide rates seen in rural India than more urbanized parts of the country is in part due to greater access to pesticides, which are used in some suicide attempts. “Urgent research is needed to explore the reasons for suicide in young people and the large regional variations seen in this study,” the paper concludes.

The need for prevention may be particularly important given the dearth of psychiatric drugs and other treatments for suicide prevention, and the difficulty of arranging clinical drug trials for suicidal people, a topic explored in depth in a recent news feature in Nature Medicine.

Image courtesy of James Steidl via Shutterstock.