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ADVANTAGE: Merck Does Say “No”
- Harold C. Sox, MD, Editor; and
- Drummond Rennie, MD
- From Annals of Internal Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19106, and JAMA, Chicago, IL 60610.
IN RESPONSE:
Dr. Edelman writes that ADVANTAGE could not have been a seeding trial because the Annals editors decided to publish it, which would imply that the trial had scientific value. We knew about the VIGOR (Vioxx Gastrointestinal Outcomes Research) trial (1), which was published in 2000 and compared Vioxx with naproxen in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. VIGOR showed that Vioxx had significantly fewer gastrointestinal side effects than naproxen. We published the ADVANTAGE trial (2) because it framed the same findings in a different way: It showed that the margin between the new drug and the comparator—also naproxen—was …
