Anesthesiologist Scott Reuben, MD, was sentenced to six months in prison for health care fraud stemming from his fabrication of data and related misdeeds in six drug trials, federal officials announced Thursday.

Dr. Reuben, 51, former chief of the acute pain clinic at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., also was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine, $361,932 in restitution to the drug companies that funded his research and to forfeit $50,000 in assets in the case. Upon completion of his prison term, Dr. Reuben must undergo three years of supervised release, the Justice Department said.

Dr. Reuben pleaded guilty to violating federal health care law in February, roughly a year after revelations of his fraudulent activities first were made public in Anesthesiology News. Dr. Reuben’s actions, which were discovered by Baystate during an audit of staff research, prompted the retraction of more than 20 articles in Anesthesia & Analgesia, Anesthesiology and other journals.

One of the studies Dr. Reuben fraudulently claimed to have gathered data for was a Pfizer-sponsored trial titled “Perioperative Administration of Celecoxib as a Component of Multimodal Analgesia for Outpatient Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction Surgery,” the Justice Department said.

Dr. Reuben’s research had been widely cited in the anesthesiology and postsurgery pain literature, particularly in the area of multimodal analgesia. Experts said the retractions left a substantial hole that would take some time to repair.

“Dr. Reuben’s conviction sends a clear and important message: If you lie, steal or cheat, you can expect to suffer the consequences of your dishonesty,” said Steven Shafer, MD, editor of Anesthesia & Analgesia.  “There is no mitigation of the consequences because of the fraud occurring in a scientific venue rather than in a financial transaction. Dr. Reuben’s conviction also sends an important message to patients: There is no tolerance for investigators who publish falsified research.”

Dr. Reuben has not spoken to the media since leaving Baystate. His attorneys were not immediately available for comment. At the time Dr. Reuben entered his guilty plea, his attorneys stated that he had been suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder during the period when he committed the fraud. Dr. Reuben attempted suicide twice in 2002, his lawyers said.

In a sentencing memorandum, Dr. Reuben's lawyers, who had argued unsuccessfully for home confinement instead of a prison term, described him as a "broken and greatly diminished" man who has "suffered substantial punishment" for his actions. He has been wiped out financially and no longer able to practice medicine, and his marriage has ended, according to the document. Dr. Reuben is now living with his parents. 

The court documents claim that Dr. Reuben's fragile mental state, in evidence since childhood, cracked during a  2000-2001 sabbatical during which he was immensely productive, publishing eight papers and a review article and making "more than 70 presentations." At the time, Dr. Reuben was conducting research, using grant money from Merck, into the effects of rofecoxib (Vioxx) in patients who had undergone total knee replacement surgery.

In his 2002 paper on that trial, published in the Journal of Arthroplasty, Dr. Reuben claimed to have enrolled 100 patients in that study, but in fact had collected data on only 26, his lawyers said.

The court documents suggest that some of Dr. Reuben's more outrageous research claims should have been easy for his co-authors and journal reviewers to spot. For a 2008 paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia, for example, reporting the effects of celecoxib  (Celebrex, Pfizer) on pain after knee replacement, Dr. Reuben claimed to have collected data on 200 patients. He had enrolled none.

"Anyone with any familiarity with [Baystate Medical Center] would know that only a handful of total knee arthroplasty surgeries are carried out there each year," according to the filing. "It therefore would have taken Dr. Reuben several years to enroll and collect data from 200 patients. At a minimum, a rational person would have realized that the data reported in this article would have been highly suspect to his co-authors."

In at least one case, however, Dr. Reuben skirted that problem by forging the name of a co-author on a manuscript—an incident of fraud that came to light when the alleged author was contacted by Anesthesiology News.