UC Davis physician receives award for research into direct-to-consumer drug advertising

AcademyHealth, the national organization for health services research and policy, has honored Richard L. Kravitz with its 2006 “Article-of-the-Year” award for his lead authorship in an article about direct-to-consumer drug advertising.

Kravitz, a professor of internal medicine, was recognized with the prestigious honor during the annual AcademyHealth research conference, which was held in Seattle this week. His paper entitled “Influence of Patients' Requests for Direct-to-Consumer Advertised Antidepressants” was originally published in a 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Along with five colleagues from UC Davis and two other researchers, Kravitz conducted a study that showed patients' requests for specific medications could have a profound effect on physicians when they are asked to prescribe medications for major depression.

In the study, Kravitz and his research team used trained actors as standardized patients to determine the effects of patients' medication requests on physicians during initial treatment decisions regarding symptoms of depression. The researchers found that in major depression, antidepressant prescribing rates were highest for visits in which standardized patients made general requests for medication (76 percent) and lowest for visits in which standardized patients made no requests for medication (31 percent).

“These results underscore the idea that patients have substantial influence on physicians and can be active agents in the production of quality. The results also suggest that direct-to-consumer advertising may have competing effects on quality, potentially averting under use, while also promoting overuse,” stated Kravitz and his co-authors in the paper.