[Drug advertising in medical journals]

To find the percentage of pages of advertising in 6 Spanish medical journals and compare their principal features with the criteria of the international committee of editors of medical journals.

A descriptive crossover study.

The Spanish general medical journals with the highest circulation.

All the issues of journals published between January and March 1993 (n = 56) were selected in order to calculate the average percentage of advertising. To analyse the adverts, all the adverts in 32 issues (n = 657) were selected by means of stratified random sampling of journals from the period July 1992 to June 1993.

The average number of advertising pages was 39.16%. 7.8% were publicity articles with or without an advertisement. Adverts filled the best pages of the journals. In 11.7% of cases the adverts were connected with articles in the journal; in 23.9% they were inserted within article. 13.4% of the adverts analysed were for drug products with doubtful or nil intrinsic value; and 34.5% were pharmaceutical novelties (marketed after 1991). The therapeutic groups with most advertisements were ACE inhibitors (13.2%), analgesics (7.8%), calcium antagonists (7.2%) and AINE (7.2%). Paracetamol (6.1%) was the active principal advertised most often.

The percentage of advertising seems excessive in all the journals except one and very much above the non-advertising informative material. There should be improvement by bringing journals into line with international editorial criteria.