Why All Those Testosterone Ads Constitute Disease Mongering

Snippet from a much longer article on Forbes.com

Archived link here

Documenting part of the much bigger pattern of disease mongering on the part of Big Pharma.

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Over the last 10 years, testosterone prescriptions have risen 10-fold in the U.S. and 40-fold in Canada, according to an editorial published today in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. It’s likely no coincidence that the U.S. and Canada are two of only three countries (the other being New Zealand) that allow direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, say the authors, Thomas Perls, a professor at Boston University and geriatrician at Boston Medical Center, and David Handelsman, a professor at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Testosterone makers and some doctors “market the idea that men go through something similar to menopause, where they have these marked declines in testosterone and all these symptoms that we normally attribute to aging,” Perls says. “They say ‘If we give you testosterone, it will reverse the problem.’ It was a wildly successful ad campaign. We consider it to be disease mongering.”

Perls and Handelsman’s critique of testosterone marketing comes just weeks after the U.S. Food & Drug Administration issued tough new rules for the companies that market the hormone treatment. The agency demanded labels be revised make it clear the drugs are only for patients with diseases like hypogonadism or injuries that cause severely low levels of testosterone, and that replacement therapy may raise the risk of cardiovascular problems. Furthermore, the agency ordered testosterone makers to conduct post-marketing research to better elucidate testosterone’s risks.

But Perls and Handelsman argue that’s not enough. They’re calling for the agency to team up with the Federal Trade Commission and ban testosterone advertising for “contrived” conditions such as Low T or “andropause,” the term commonly used for male menopause. And they’re urging the FDA and Health Canada to require physicians to demonstrate—with legitimate hormone testing and the like—that any patient handed a prescription for testosterone actually has a disease that needs to be treated.

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