An authorship dispute between a pair of Egyptian physicians has led to the retraction of their 2012 article on anesthetic technique for laparoscopic colon surgery.
The article, “General anesthesia versus segmental thoracic or conventional lumbar spinal anesthesia for patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy,” appeared in Anesthesia Essays and Researches — a publication of the Pan Arab Federation of Societies of Anesthesiologists. It written by Gamal Yousef and Ahmed E. Lasheen, both of Zagazig University (which, we’re guessing, would hold the record for institution of higher learning with the most possible points in Scrabble — with a triple word tile that’s at least 131 points, including the seven-letter bonus!).
According to the retraction notice:
The following article is being retracted due to dispute in authorship.
Of course, the nature of the dispute is not immediately clear. But we found something that might shed some light on the matter. Yousef in September had a poster at the 2nd International Conference on Surgery and Anesthesia, held in Las Vegas, in which he appeared to describe the same study in the retracted paper. Lasheen’s name is nowhere to be found on the poster.
From the paper:
The present study not only confirmed that both segmental TSA and conventional lumber spinal anesthesia (LSA) are safe and good alternatives to general anesthesia (GA) in healthy patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy but also showed better postoperative pain control of both spinal techniques when compared with general anesthesia. Segmental TSA provides better hemodynamic stability, lesser vasopressor use and early ambulation and discharge with higher degree of patient satisfaction making it excellent for day case surgery compared with conventional lumbar spinal anesthesia.
From the poster:
The present study not only confirmed that both segmental TSA and conventional lumber spinal anesthesia (LSA) are safe and good alternatives to general anesthesia (GA) in healthy patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy but also showed better postoperative pain control of both spinal techniques when compared with general anesthesia. Segmental TSA provides better hemodynamic stability, lesser vasopressor use and early ambulation and discharge with higher degree of patient satisfaction making it excellent for day case surgery compared with conventional lumbar spinal anesthesia.
I would just like to point out a controversial statement in this article. Specifically, Zagazig being a proper noun, would not be regarded as acceptable in traditional rules Scrabble. It is true that the new official rules allow proper nouns, but this recent capitulation to market forces is frowned upon by hardcore Scrabblers…. 😉
Plus there’s only one Z tile, so the second would have to be a blank tile used as a Z, which scores zero.