A renewed grant from the Merck Company Foundation is enabling Cornell researchers affiliated with the Consumers, Pharmaceutical Policy and Health (CPPH) program in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management (PAM) in the College of Human Ecology to go forward with a number of research projects to help consumers in the realm of pharmaceuticals and health.

The three-year, $600,000 grant is being used at Cornell in a number of ways:

• To study how effective smoking-cessation ads are in getting people to quit smoking and the impact of direct-to-consumer advertising on product choice for a number of pharmaceutical categories; the researchers will use Cornell's premier digital archive of print advertising of all prescription and over-the-counter products in the most-read magazines in the United States from 1985 to 2004.
• To examine the causes and consequences of the use of anti-obesity drugs.
• To develop a pharmaceutical price index for several drug categories to determine whether consumers benefit from higher-priced but newer drugs that have improved attributes.
• To use Cornell's extensive database on Medicaid pharmacy benefit restrictions for each state and year from 1990 to 2003 as well as several other databases to analyze how state policy affects prescription drug costs and patterns of prescription drug use. Researchers will start with anti-psychotic and antidepressant medications.
• To investigate how consumers and physicians respond when certain drugs are taken off the market -- whether they increase or decrease their use of rival medications.

The grant of $200,000 per year for three years allows PAM to strengthen its CPPH program, which was launched three years ago when PAM received its initial Merck funding.

"The first three years have been highly productive, generating research and educational initiatives that would otherwise not have been developed," said Alan Mathios, professor in PAM and associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Human Ecology. "We look forward to continuing our efforts, expanding our current projects and developing new projects related to these themes concerning the causes, consequences and performance of public policies toward the pharmaceuticals industry, with particular emphasis on the interaction of public policies and private decisions for health and consumer well-being."

Cornell's award is part of more than $7 million in grants given to 12 academic institutions throughout the world; the other U.S. institutions are the University of Chicago, Columbia/Stanford Consortium on Medical Innovation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania.