Last year, JAMA editor Catherine DeAngelis received the Catcher in the Rye humanitarian prize “because of her leadership on discussions of conflicts of interest in medicine.”

This year she’s knee-deep in shmutz regarding JAMA’s questionable handling of just such a matter.

The dust-up began last spring when JAMA published a study of methods to prevent depression in stroke patients. In the study, Robert Robinson and a team from the University of Iowa compared counseling, antidepressant therapy with Lexapro, and a placebo.

Robinson heaped praise on the pharmaceutical intervention following publication of his study.

 “Every stroke patient who can tolerate an antidepressant should be given one,” he told USA Today.

The study had shown that both counseling and Lexapro outperformed placebo, but there wasn’t a whit of difference between the 2 treatment groups.

Robinson acknowledged that in a letter to JAMA last fall.

Robinson’s letter prompted Lincoln Memorial University professor Jonathan Leo to sleuth around a bit.

He discovered that Robinson had accepted speaker’s fees from Forest Laboratories, the maker of Lexapro, and had not disclosed this.

Leo notified JAMA. The journal said it would investigate, but according to Leo, 5 months passed and nothing happened. That’s when he and a colleague published the discovery in a letter to the British Medical Journal.

Three nanoseconds later according to Leo, DeAngelis phoned Leo and his dean threatening to cut off Leo’s work from the light of JAMA’s day forever.

DeAngelis denies this.

Robinson has since admitted receiving speakers’ fees from Forest Laboratories “in 2004 and perhaps 2005.” He apologized in a letter to JAMA citing “errors of memory.”

The same day, JAMA published an accompanying erratum.

It appears that JAMA intended to publish these latter 2 items even if Leo’s letter hadn’t been posted in BMJ days before.

The AMA has asked a journal oversight committee to investigate.

A study from the National Cancer Institute has shown that excessive consumption of red meat, processed meat and pork increases all-cause mortality.

Rashmi Sinha and colleagues published the bad news in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The scientists reviewed data from 545,653 adult volunteers who participated in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. Participants completed dietary questionnaires and were followed for 10 years.

After controlling for confounding variables, the scientists found that the most carnivorous women, who were good for a quarter-pound of red meat per day, were 36% percent more likely to die for any reason, 50% more likely to die of cardiac disease and 20% more likely to die of cancer.

It was about the same for men.

Heavy consumption of sausage, cold cuts and other processed meat resulted in the same fate, whereas big-time consumers of fish and white meat died off 8% less frequently than those who rarely ate them.

Previous studies had identified an association between red meat consumption and a higher risk of cardiac disease and colorectal cancer, but this one was the first to reveal a link to all cause mortality.

“The uniqueness of this study is its size and length of follow-up,” Barry Popkin told the Washington Post. The professor of nutrition at UNC added “if people want to be healthy and live longer, consume less red and processed meat.’”

The rap sheet on red meat is longer than Blagojevich’s. Cooking it generates carcinogens. It’s laced with saturated fat, which is linked to colorectal and breast cancer. It’s high in iron, another cancer promoter. It jacks up blood pressure and cholesterol, and so forth. 

For their part, processed meats contain carcinogenic nitrosamines, and pork bumps up cancer risk too, probably because it contains iron.

The American Meat Institute blew off the findings.

“Meat products are part of a healthy, balanced diet,” James Hodges, the group’s EVP told the Washington Post.

“Studies show they provide a sense of satisfaction and fullness that can help with weight control. Proper body weight contributes to good health overall.”

Russian and Chinese cyberspies have accessed the US electrical grid and inserted software that, if activated, can disrupt the system and cause massive blackouts according to national security officials.

The intruders have not attempted to bring down the grid, but one official told the Wall Street Journal that “if we go to war with them, they will try.”

Nearly all the violations were detected by US intelligence agencies, not the companies responsible for the infrastructure.

The intelligence officials also raised concerns that cybercriminals could carry out similar crimes against nuclear power plants, financial networks and water and sewage systems, since they all rely on the Internet for communication and control.

In 2000 for example, a whacked-out Australian hacker commanded a water-treatment facility to release 200,000 gallons of raw sewage into rivers, parks, and property owned by a Hyatt hotel.

And Tom Donahue, a senior CIA official said that last year, a coordinated cyberattack shut down power equipment in several countries outside the US. The attackers subsequently tried to extort money, according to Donahue.

“Our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as (our) foreign counterparts,” warned Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair.

Nevertheless, these officials see no immediate danger.

China, for example, can’t afford to disrupt our economy since American consumers are major purchasers of its products.

The Big O has tasked a committee to review US cybersecurity programs. The report is due next week.

“Russia has nothing to do with cyberattacks on US infrastructure or on infrastructure in any other country,” Yevgeniy Khorishko, a Russian Embassy spokesman admonished the Journal.

The Chinese government “resolutely oppose[s] any crime, including hacking, that destroys the Internet or computer networks” echoed Chinese Embassy spokesperson Wang Baodong.