ArticleJournal of clinical epidemiology2010
"A delicate diplomatic situation": tobacco industry efforts to gain control of the Framingham Study.
Article in Journal of clinical epidemiology, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Tobacco industry influence on breast cancer research, policy and public opinion: scoping the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents.Tobacco control · 2026Article
- Evidence Regarding the Impact of Conflicts of Interest on Environmental and Occupational Health Research.Current environmental health reports · 2017Review
- Article
- Older smokers could be the strongest supporters for U.S. government regulation of tobacco: a focus group study.Tobacco induced diseases · 2013Article
- Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.Frontiers in psychology · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe Framingham Heart Study (henceforth Framingham) is among the gold standards for epidemiological research. Being a prospective cohort study of 5,000+ men and women, it provided early findings about the causes of coronary heart disease (CHD), following a cohort over the course of 24 years. After US government funding ended, the tobacco industry funded Council for Tobacco Research (CTR) provided continued funding for analyses related to smoking.
objectiveThis study sought to understand the tobacco industry's motivation and activities in funding Framingham. STUDY DESIGN AND
settingWe analyzed previously undisclosed tobacco industry documents, conducting iterative searches of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/), and assembled a historical case study.
resultsCTR funded Framingham to obtain full access to Framingham data. CTR planned for long-time industry consultant Carl Seltzer to reanalyze them to suggest that tobacco-related morbidity and mortality primarily resulted from "constitutional" factors, such as age or ethnicity. Once data were obtained, CTR terminated funding for the Framingham principal investigator, who disagreed with Seltzer. Seltzer's critical analyses of subsequently published work by the Framingham team created confusion about the association between CHD and cigarette smoking.
conclusionResearchers accepting tobacco industry funding risk losing control of data, analysis, and publication.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.