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Disease awareness or subtle product placement? Orphan diseases featured in the television series “House, M.D.” - a cross-sectional analysis

BACKGROUND: Approximately 7% of the general population is affected by an orphan disease, which, in the United States, is defined as affecting fewer than 1 in 1500 people. Disease awareness is often low and time-to-diagnosis delayed. Different legislations worldwide have created incentives for pharma...

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Autores principales: Mechler, Konstantin, Rausch, Juliane, Mountford, William K., Ries, Markus
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7071776/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32171294
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-0463-x
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author Mechler, Konstantin
Rausch, Juliane
Mountford, William K.
Ries, Markus
author_facet Mechler, Konstantin
Rausch, Juliane
Mountford, William K.
Ries, Markus
author_sort Mechler, Konstantin
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Approximately 7% of the general population is affected by an orphan disease, which, in the United States, is defined as affecting fewer than 1 in 1500 people. Disease awareness is often low and time-to-diagnosis delayed. Different legislations worldwide have created incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for orphan diseases. A journalistic article in Bloomberg Businessweek has claimed that pharmaceutical companies have tried marketing orphan drugs by placing a specific disease into the popular television series “House, M.D.” which features diagnostic journeys and was produced between 2004 and 2012. This study aimed to describe the presentation of orphan diseases in the television series “House, M.D.”, to test in an exploratory fashion the hypothesis that treatable orphan conditions are overrepresented in “House, M.D.” and to discuss whether such marketing practices may or may not be ethical. METHODS: A list of all medical cases depicted in the television series “House, M.D.” was obtained and classified as orphan or non-orphan according to the Orphanet database. The ratios of orphan diseases among all diseases, such with an orphan drug designation and such with an orphan drug approval by the FDA were then compared with conservative approximations of real world conditions (chi-squared tests for equality of proportions). STROBE criteria were respected. RESULTS: Out of a total of n = 181 different medical diagnoses, n = 42 (23.2%) were orphan diseases. The difference in percentages in between “House, M.D.” and reality was not statistically significant for orphan diseases overall (p = 0.96), yet was statistically significantly higher for both orphan diseases with one or more orphan drug designations (p = 0.0192) and such with one or more approved orphan drugs (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Orphan diseases with a designated and/or approved orphan drug were overrepresented in the television series “House, M.D.” with statistical significance while orphan diseases overall were not. This may be explained by (so far) undocumented efforts of pharmaceutical companies to place their orphan drugs in the television series, as described in the article in Bloomberg Businessweek. Further research is needed into marketing practices in popular and emerging media formats.
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spelling pubmed-70717762020-03-18 Disease awareness or subtle product placement? Orphan diseases featured in the television series “House, M.D.” - a cross-sectional analysis Mechler, Konstantin Rausch, Juliane Mountford, William K. Ries, Markus BMC Med Ethics Research Article BACKGROUND: Approximately 7% of the general population is affected by an orphan disease, which, in the United States, is defined as affecting fewer than 1 in 1500 people. Disease awareness is often low and time-to-diagnosis delayed. Different legislations worldwide have created incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for orphan diseases. A journalistic article in Bloomberg Businessweek has claimed that pharmaceutical companies have tried marketing orphan drugs by placing a specific disease into the popular television series “House, M.D.” which features diagnostic journeys and was produced between 2004 and 2012. This study aimed to describe the presentation of orphan diseases in the television series “House, M.D.”, to test in an exploratory fashion the hypothesis that treatable orphan conditions are overrepresented in “House, M.D.” and to discuss whether such marketing practices may or may not be ethical. METHODS: A list of all medical cases depicted in the television series “House, M.D.” was obtained and classified as orphan or non-orphan according to the Orphanet database. The ratios of orphan diseases among all diseases, such with an orphan drug designation and such with an orphan drug approval by the FDA were then compared with conservative approximations of real world conditions (chi-squared tests for equality of proportions). STROBE criteria were respected. RESULTS: Out of a total of n = 181 different medical diagnoses, n = 42 (23.2%) were orphan diseases. The difference in percentages in between “House, M.D.” and reality was not statistically significant for orphan diseases overall (p = 0.96), yet was statistically significantly higher for both orphan diseases with one or more orphan drug designations (p = 0.0192) and such with one or more approved orphan drugs (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Orphan diseases with a designated and/or approved orphan drug were overrepresented in the television series “House, M.D.” with statistical significance while orphan diseases overall were not. This may be explained by (so far) undocumented efforts of pharmaceutical companies to place their orphan drugs in the television series, as described in the article in Bloomberg Businessweek. Further research is needed into marketing practices in popular and emerging media formats. BioMed Central 2020-03-14 /pmc/articles/PMC7071776/ /pubmed/32171294 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-0463-x Text en © The Author(s). 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Mechler, Konstantin
Rausch, Juliane
Mountford, William K.
Ries, Markus
Disease awareness or subtle product placement? Orphan diseases featured in the television series “House, M.D.” - a cross-sectional analysis
title Disease awareness or subtle product placement? Orphan diseases featured in the television series “House, M.D.” - a cross-sectional analysis
title_full Disease awareness or subtle product placement? Orphan diseases featured in the television series “House, M.D.” - a cross-sectional analysis
title_fullStr Disease awareness or subtle product placement? Orphan diseases featured in the television series “House, M.D.” - a cross-sectional analysis
title_full_unstemmed Disease awareness or subtle product placement? Orphan diseases featured in the television series “House, M.D.” - a cross-sectional analysis
title_short Disease awareness or subtle product placement? Orphan diseases featured in the television series “House, M.D.” - a cross-sectional analysis
title_sort disease awareness or subtle product placement? orphan diseases featured in the television series “house, m.d.” - a cross-sectional analysis
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7071776/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32171294
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-0463-x
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