From an editorial in the November 22 issue of CMAJ:
Clinical practice guidelines and conflict of interest
CMAJ November 22, 2005; 173 (11):1297.
Excerpt: In the face of the growing evidence that financial conflicts of interest bias expert recommendations in favour of sponsors' products, this Journal (along with most major medical journals) will not accept for publication consensus statements, narrative reviews, commentaries and similar types of articles that recommend drugs, devices, laboratory tests or other interventions for which at least one of the authors has a significant financial conflict of interest.4
To date we have excluded guidelines from this policy, requiring only disclosure of financial conflicts of interest. We are now reconsidering that policy. In the interim we will ask guideline developers to send us a detailed disclosure of their conflicts of interest before submitting their manuscript; this information will subsequently be made available to peer reviewers, should the paper be considered.

This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey.
