Jerry Avorn - Biography

Biography

Dr. Avorn was born February 13, 1948 in New York City and grew up in Rockaway, Queens. While attending Columbia University during the tumultuous opposition to the Vietnam War and American civil rights movement, he distinguished himself as a leading campus activist against the Vietnam War with his investigative journalism for the Columbia Daily Spectator. In the summer of 1969, he wrote Up Against the Ivy Wall with fellow Spectator journalists about the campus uprisings at Columbia.

Dr. Avorn graduated from Harvard Medical School with an M.D. in 1974. He was a resident at the Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts and then at the Beth Israel Hospital (now the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts). He became an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School in 1985 and a full Professor in 2005.

In 1983, he published his first paper on academic detailing. The practice has now been taken up by several hospitals and governments, such as Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Australia, Israel, and Nova Scotia. His work on academic detailing was featured in the Wall Street Journal and on The Daily Show.

His later research documented the high rate at which patients do not take their medications as directed, and the factors (older age, low income, non-white race) associated with this common problem. Other studies measured the risk of side effects caused by specific drugs, such as the appearance of a condition similar to Parkinson's disease in older patients taking certain potent tranquilizers. He and his colleagues have also published several studies on the cost-effectiveness of drugs, systematically comparing a product’s beneficial effects with its price tag.

In 1996 he published Reduction of bacteriuria and pyuria after ingestion of cranberry juice in the Journal of the American Medical Association which identified cranberry juice as an effective means of controlling urinary tract infections in elderly women.

The unit he now heads, the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics (known internally as DOPE), continues to study the relationship between the benefits, risks, and costs of medications; it also conducts a teaching program on these topics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital for the Harvard medical students, interns, and residents studying there. Dr. Avorn is the author of over 200 papers in the medical literature on medication use and outcomes, and is one of the most frequently cited researchers in the field of social science and medicine. A cogent advocate for more rational prescribing, he has testified several times before Congress on medication-related issues, and his work has been featured on National Public Radio (All Things Considered, Morning Edition, The Connection) and in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and USA Today. Dr. Avorn is also past president of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology .

His paper on coxibs was one of the first medical research papers to demonstrate that Vioxx increased some patients' risk of heart attack and stroke. In 2006 he testified as a plaintiff’s expert witness in the Vioxx litigation, but he donates all profit from his involvement to his Alosa charitable foundation.

Dr. Avorn lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife, community activist Karen Tucker. They have two grown sons: Andrew Avorn (Columbia University Class of 2008, NYU Law Class of 2012), and Nathaniel Avorn (Connecticut College Class of 2003). In his leisure time, Dr. Avorn enjoys napping, reading, and travel.