The Journal of Pediatric Nursing has retracted a 2013 article (meeting abstract, really) on growth hormone after the drug company that employed the authors cried “take it back.”
The research appears to have been presented at a meeting of the Pediatric Endocrinology Nursing Society, and looked at inefficiency in the use of devices for administering growth hormone. All but one of the authors is listed as working for Novo Nordisk, an international pharmaceutical firm.
Here’s the notice:
The abstract “Evaluation of Product Wastage From Modern Human Growth Hormone Administration Devices,” which published in Journal of Pediatric Nursing, vol. 28 (2013), p. 208, has been retracted at the request of the author, as it is related to an internal disagreement at the author’s company concerning the submission of this abstract to the Pediatric Endocrinology Nursing Society. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pedn.2013.02.017.
Now, we get that Novo Nordisk might have a claim to proprietary data, if that’s what’s in fact at issue here. But we wonder why they chose to claw back this particular abstract when the same group (or a reasonable facsimile of it) has presented and published on the same topic multiple times before.
For example, in August they had “Product wastage from modern human growth hormone administration devices: a laboratory and computer simulation analysis,” in Medical Devices: Evidence and Research.
And last November they had “Evaluation of Product Wastage From Modern Human Growth Hormone Administration Devices,” in Value In Health, a pharmacoeconomics journal.
Maybe Novo Nordisk wasn’t aware of those other reports, which don’t appear on its staff publications site.
Note that the first author on the abstract is not on the two related papers.