Drug journal jumps the gun on publishing response to comment

This one’s a little circular: The Annals of Pharmacotherapy, a SAGE journal, has retracted an author’s response to a letter to the editor that was never published. The original paper, “Intravenous sodium bicarbonate therapy in severely acidotic diabetic ketoacidosis,” is unaffected by the retraction.

According to the notice:

This letter to the editor has been retracted as it responds to an original letter that was withdrawn prior to publication. As a result, the above letter is now a response to a comment that has not been and will not be published.

Looks as though it was a two-step mix-up. A spokesperson for SAGE gave us a fleshed-out version:

Duhon et al provided an immediate response. The plan was for the comment and response to be published in the same issue…The editors reached out to the commenter, to get a signed form for permission to publish his comment. I think they actually tried six or seven times to get ahold of the commenter. They never heard back. In the interim, the reply was published in error, ahead of the comment. When the comment was withdrawn, the reply was no longer necessary.

Bryson Duhon, the lead author of the paper, gave some details about the unpublished letter:

Their letter centered around comas. One severe complication of [diabetic ketoacidosis] is coma. But our research wasn’t designed to study that from the get-go. What I pointed out was none of the previous studies we used as background talked about [coma or patients with altered mental states]. In a retrospective of the study, we really couldn’t comment on it…also our data was from adults, and a lot of the stuff they referenced in their letter was in pediatric patients, which is totally different…Something fell through the cracks, where the response was published but the letter wasn’t.