The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) today retracted a paper it published last year claiming that vaping was linked to heart attacks.
The paper, by Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, has faced a barrage of criticism since its publication last June — and Glantz’s claims, in a blog post, that the study was “More evidence that e-cigs cause heart attacks.”
Brad Rodu, a professor at the University of Louisville who comments frequently on vaping, asked the journal to retract the study shortly after it was published. The study, he said, had failed to account for which happened first — heart attacks or vaping. The contretemps was the subject of a July 2019 story by USA Today:
However, when Rodu obtained the federal data, he found the majority of the 38 patients in the study who had heart attacks had them before they started vaping — by an average of 10 years earlier. In his letter to the editors, Rodu called Glantz’s findings “false and invalid.”
JAHA published a correction to the article’s supplemental material in November:
The authors had not properly obtained permission from the Inter‐university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the organization that manages the PATH restricted use dataset, to publish 8 numbers that represented the detailed event breakdowns listing number of MIs among e‐cigarette users in Table S6 of their article. In order to come into compliance with the Restricted Use Data Agreement and Data Security Plan to which the authors and their institution, the University of California San Francisco agreed, they have replaced Table S6 with a version that does not include the offending numbers. Removing these details does not affect the text or conclusions of the paper.
The authors regret the error.
In today’s retraction notice, the journal writes:
After becoming aware that the study in the above‐referenced article did not fully account for certain information in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health [PATH] Wave 1 survey, the editors of Journal of the American Heart Association reviewed the peer review process.
During peer review, the reviewers identified the important question of whether the myocardial infarctions occurred before or after the respondents initiated e‐cigarette use, and requested that the authors use additional data in the PATH codebook (age of first MI and age of first e‐cigarettes use) to address this concern. While the authors did provide some additional analysis, the reviewers and editors did not confirm that the authors had both understood and complied with the request prior to acceptance of the article for publication.
Post publication, the editors requested Dr. Bhatta et al conduct the analysis based on when specific respondents started using e‐cigarettes, which required ongoing access to the restricted use dataset from the PATH Wave 1 survey.1 The authors agreed to comply with the editors’ request. The deadline set by the editors for completion of the revised analysis was not met because the authors are currently unable to access the PATH database. Given these issues, the editors are concerned that the study conclusion is unreliable.
The editors hereby retract the article from publication in Journal of the American Heart Association.
The paper has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Glantz stands by paper
Glantz, one of the world’s leading researchers on tobacco control, tells Retraction Watch that:
The University of Michigan has cut off all of UCSF’s access. UCSF has been working to try and get access restored for months.
He said he was preparing a blog post on the matter and that:
We stand behind the paper as published.
In October 2018, we reported at STAT that UCSF had agreed to pay a former postdoc $150,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit involving Glantz. In the settlement, Glantz and UCSF “deny and dispute” the allegations by the former postdoc.
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In 1965, Bradford Hill established his criteria for causality. While not all of the criteria need to be met for a causal association to exist, but temporality is essential; exposure must occur before the event. In this case, the vaping MUST have occurred before the heart attacks for a causal association to exist (an obvious fact).
However, Rodu’s analysis suggests Bhatta & Glantz don’t agree with this idea – an absolutely amazing thought process. I’d love to hear their mechanism of action of how vaping today caused heart attacks on average 10 years ago. It’s notable that the reviewers picked up on this issue, yet the paper still was published.
This is exactly what happens when so-called researchers bring their agendas and biases to the study. The data MUST conform to a pre-conceived notion, and disproving that notion is NOT an acceptable outcome. The authors ought to be ashamed of themselves, and should be fired. Wait. The senior author did “step down“, and what additional baggage this guy brings with him. Kudos for JAHA editors who did the right thing, even if it was delayed.
Read the paper and the authors rebuttal to the criticisms in the journal Addiction. The authors are careful to not state their findings in the paper are “causal” and they address concerns over reverse causality. Retractions are serious consequences and should be used for scientific misconduct not because researchers have legitimate disagreements over the analysis and interpretation of findings. The journal should have allowed critics and the authors to debate these issues openly in publication as science should (and was later allowed in a different journal). This post leaves out the fact that the chief critic of this paper (Rodu) receives funding from tobacco companies. This was a rush to judgment on behalf of the journal.