Methods
This retrospective study examined the size and proportion of personal
payments made by pharmaceutical companies to all authors of CPGs
published by the Japanese Society of Neurology between 2016 and 2020.
Major pharmaceutical companies affiliated with the Japan Pharmaceutical
Manufacturers Association (JPMA), the largest pharmaceutical industry
trade organization, were mandated to disclose payments made to
physicians for lectures, consultancy services, and manuscript and
pamphlet writing, including individual physicians’ names, on their
company webpages.19 These payments, disclosed by the
companies on their respective webpages, were voluntarily collected by an
independent research organization and published in a searchable online
database (https://yenfordocs.jp/). The latest version of this database
contained payment data from 2016 to 2020. We extracted data on payments
for lecturing, consulting, and writing compensations made to the CPG
authors from 2016 to 2020. The total amounts of payments and the number
of CPG authors receiving payments were calculated. Descriptive analyses,
including mean, standard deviation (SD), median, and interquartile range
(IQR), were performed on the payment data collected from the companies
between 2017 and 2020. As this study was a retrospective analysis of
publicly available data and met the criteria for non-human subjects
research, institutional board approval was not required.