‘A costly mistake’ prompts retraction of paper on hair loss

A “costly mistake” has led to the retraction of a paper by a team of dermatology researchers in West Virginia who failed to obtain permission to use the data in their study for the specific purpose for which it was used. 

The article, “Association Between Alopecia Areata and Natural Hair Color Among White Individuals,” which appeared in March 2021 in JAMA Dermatology, was a case-control study based on data from the UK Biobank — a large repository of medical and genetic data from people in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the article was Michael Kolodney, the chair of the department of dermatology at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown. 

In fact, Kolodney and his colleagues had produced two articles using data from the biobank: one on alopecia areata — an autoimmune condition that causes relatively early-onset hair loss — and another that linked baldness to an increased risk of Covid-19 in men. The Covid research was published in November 2020 as a letter to the editor in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

The Covid paper remains intact. But as the retraction notice indicates, the folks at UK Biobank  hadn’t granted Kolodney’s group permission to publish the alopecia findings:  

We write to request retraction of our article, “Association Between Alopecia Areata and Natural Hair Color Among White Individuals,” which was published online first on March 10, 2021, in JAMA Dermatology.¹ One of us (M.S.K.) was recently made aware that the data included in this study were used without proper authorization in our material transfer agreement with the UK Biobank. The UK Biobank data containing outpatient medical records was approved for our COVID-19-related study,² but not for this alopecia areata study. The following acknowledgment in the article was inaccurate: “The study was conducted using the UK Biobank resource (approved UK Biobank application: 66911).” Although project 66911 was approved and awaiting finalization of the material transfer agreement, it was not authorized to use this specific outpatient database, which was restricted to COVID-19 studies. After discussion with the UK Biobank, we have requested that the article be retracted. There are no other institutional concerns related to the UK Biobank data set or institutional review board oversight of this study. We apologize to the readers and editors of JAMA Dermatology for this inappropriate publication.

Ahmed Yousaf, the first author of the retracted article, said:

Frankly, we were shocked by the UKB email. In fact, we requested the primary care data without COVID restrictions in early summer and waited ~ 3 months to begin the study until that dataset was given proper access. Still, we ended up making a costly mistake.

While it was unfortunate to pull an otherwise ethically sound paper with a strong premise, we agree with the UK Biobank that appropriate data use and participant protection trumps the value of any publication. We thank the UKB team for their vigilance and protection of data rights and fully understand the seriousness of the error inappropriate data use represents, regardless of intention.

Yousaf, a medical student at WVU and a research fellow in the department of dermatology there, and his colleagues offered the following bit of advice: 

A friendly word of caution to the research community – with the rise of biobanks/large datasets in the 21^st century, researchers should pay particular attention to data rights restrictions and carefully vet the use of any data source before using it for scientific purposes. There are hundreds of thousands of patient records entrusted in the hands of responsible researchers. If you’re unlucky and a similar mistake happens to you, be fully transparent and understand that errors are a part of the scientific process, but more importantly, think critically about what changes need to be made in your scientific approach.

We asked Yousaf if his group intends to obtain the requisite permissions from UK Biobank and republish their paper: 

The data is sound and we’ve asked this question ourselves. Given the fact we’ve not been in this position before, we’re still trying to decide what to do.  … For now, I think it’s important to be patient and critically evaluate what got us here. 

He added: 

I think the current predicament puts me in a precarious situation. I’ve published 15+ high-quality articles over the past 2 years, all with deliberate care. I was even told to print my prepared manuscripts and review them word for word with a highlighter to make sure there were no errors. Now, I’ll be applying [to residency programs] and there’s no doubt programs may reject me entirely based on this incident. 

This was an unfortunate outcome for a paper I poured my soul into. But I try to see the silver lining – I think the lessons are to take research slow and steady, fully understand the ethical responsibilities in publishing, and a willingness to be transparent when errors happen (an inevitability for all researchers; most just don’t face retraction).

The UK Biobank declined to comment on the retraction.

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