Editor changes industry-backed tanning pill study

A journal editor has scrubbed a line supporting the use of a L’Oreal-Nestle tanning pill from the conclusion of a company-sponsored study.

The edits come days after a Reuters Health story—http://link.reuters.com/wuv52n—about serious shortcomings in the report.

Dr. Tanya Bleiker, editor of the British Journal of Dermatology, which published the study, told Reuters Health this week by e-mail she had changed the conclusion of the report, with the permission of the authors, and added the researchers’ financial conflicts.

Half of them were employees of Laboratoires Inneov, a joint venture between L’Oreal and Nestle that makes the tanning pill, called Inneov Sun Sensitivity. However, the original version of the study did not include a conflict of interest statement, Bleiker said last week, because “the authors stated very clearly that there was no conflict of interest.”

The pill has already been launched in Europe and South America, and the company said it was getting ready to market it to skin doctors.

On the first page of the report, the researchers concluded that their “results support the use of this nutritional supplement.”

That sentence has now been removed. But the new version of the report now available online still says the tanning pill increases the threshold for sunburns and “represents a complementary strategy to sun avoidance and sunscreen use for a global approach to photoprotection.”

An independent dermatologist who reviewed the results for Reuters Health disputed those claims last week.

Referring to whether the pill would protect women against the sun’s harmful UV rays, Dr. Peter Schalock, a dermatologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said he had “hard time seeing that statistically or scientifically (the researchers) have proven it.”

SOURCE:  British Journal of Dermatology.