In a move that should please U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, The Journal of the American Medical Association will shift its editorial policies in the wake of complaints concerning study authors’ possible financial connections to health care and pharmaceutical industries.

JAMA will announce its new policy in an editorial this week, according to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. The medical journal had been criticized for taking five months to acknowledge that a study on the use of antidepressants in stroke victims was written by a University of Iowa psychiatrist with a financial relationship with the maker of the pharmaceutical studied.

Grassley sent out a press release indicating he had asked eight medical journals to describe their ghostwriting policies as a broader effort to establish transparency with regard to financial relationships between the drug industry and medical professionals.

“Public dollars and the public trust are at stake in the practice of medicine, and the information that is shared in these journals can influence decisions made by doctors and their patients. Transparency can do a lot of good in building confidence that there’s nothing to hide, and that applies to how expert opinion is presented in public forums like these journals provide,” Grassley said.

Grassley also wrote a letter to 23 medical schools requesting information about their conflict-of-interest policies and disclosure of federal research dollars donated by pharmaceutical companies to staff physicians.

Both Grassley, an Iowa Republican who is ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, and U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana), who is chairman of the committee, have been placed under the microscope due to former staff members now lobbying for the health care and pharmaceutical industries during the congressional discussion on health care reform. The lobbying firm Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, which represents at least six pharmaceutical or health care products companies, includes both Baucus’ former chief of staff David Castagnetti and Grassley’s former health policy adviser Colette Desmarais. One of Mehlman Vogal Castagnetti’s clients — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — has doubled its spending to nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2009.