Cancer of the vulva may well be a topic most people do not want to discuss. But we wish the Journal of Lower Genital Tract Disease (the official journal of several societies, including the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology, the Australian Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology and the Society of Canadian Colposcopists) had been a bit more forthcoming about its retraction of a 2013 paper on the subject.
The article, “Granular Cell Tumor of the Vulva,” appeared in the January issue of the journal from a group whose last last author was Sofia Vázquez Navarrete, a pathologist at La Línea de la Concepción, in Cádiz, Spain.
Its abstract stated:
Background: Granular cell tumors are uncommon neoplasms that can involve the skin and subcutaneous tissue. Currently, they are thought to be of neurogenic origin and most likely originate from Schwann cells.
Case Presentation: This is a case of a 33-year-old woman with a growing vulvar tumor during the past year. Physical examination reveals a 2 × 1-cm mass in the lower third of the right labium majus and adjacent perineal skin. The lesion is excised, and the pathological report informs of the presence of a granular cell tumor.
Conclusions: Granular cell tumors are uncommon neoplasms but should always be included as a possibility in the differential diagnosis of vulvar lesions. The treatment of choice is local wide excision, which is curative in most of the cases.
Evidently, we are not to believe that. According to the retraction “notice“:
To the Editor—The authors of this manuscript published in The Journal of Lower Genital Tract Disease,
2013;17:82Y84, would like to retract this paper and its conclusions.Manuel Dominguez-Gonzalez, MD
Adolfo Nogales-Perez
Sofia Vazquez Navarrete
La Linea de la Concepcion Hospital
Cadiz, Spain
Compounding the sin of vagary, this meager statement is behind a paywall. We’ve asked Navarrete and the editors of the journal for more information, and will update with anything we learn.
Update, 11:55 a.m. Eastern, 7/1/13: Headline changed from “vaginal tumor” to “vulvar tumor” per comment from Alice Dreger below.
I would hope the guys at Retraction Watch would know the difference between a vulva and a vagina. Please correct your headline, etc. Thanks.
Thanks for your critique. We changed the headline, but if there’s something else we missed please let us know.
At 9:48 Central European Summer Time, searching the journal’s website with the name “Sofia Vazquez Navarrete” returns this page
http://journals.lww.com/jlgtd/pages/results.aspx?txtKeywords=Sofia%20Vazquez%20Navarrete , which lists the short title of the article followed by the word “Retraction” and a link to the retraction notice (open access now – thanks again, RW!), followed by the short title of the article (pay-per-view; abstract only accessible), followed by thumbnails of the figures – which probably don’t need to be available at this stage in the article’s publication history.