A BMJ Group journal has retracted a paper nearly nine years after a journalist raised concerns about undisclosed conflicts of interest and the study’s details contradicting those of its trial registration. The researchers also excluded a patient’s death from the study, the retraction notice says.
The study, published in Open Heart in May 2017, described the results of a clinical trial that tested commercially available stents with microengineered grooves produced by Abbott Vascular.
But four months later, veteran cardiology journalist Larry Husten pointed out the clinical trial registration described a plan to employ two stents produced by a different device maker – Palmaz Scientific, a company that funded the work and was owned by one of the authors. He also wrote that records “indicate that one patient in the trial died as a result of pancreatitis. It seems unlikely that this was related to the stent but shouldn’t this information have been reported in the Open Heart paper?”
Husten, who had earned a cease and desist letter for writing about Palmaz in 2016, emailed the journal to alert the editors. In a July 2018 response in Open Heart, corresponding author Juan Granada denied Husten’s allegation he received financial compensation as an author of the study. He also wrote that the patient whose death was not reported died of pancreatitis “several months beyond the reported follow up period, which is why the patient was not included in the study results.”
A correction to the paper posted six months later noted one of its authors, Julio Palmaz, “is a founder of Palmaz Scientific,” and that another author, Charles Simonton, was “an employee” of Abbott Vascular. The correction notice stated the conflicts were “properly disclosed but erroneously missed” when the article was published.
In a retraction notice published last month, the authors now claim the clinical trial registration was “inaccurate” and the stents were made by Abbott, as the published paper had stated.
The notice also says seven study participants were missing from the paper and one patient died “outside of the follow-up period.” The authors reported the death to the institutional review board, the notice reads, but did not report the death in their study.
The journal had additional concerns regarding “possible undisclosed financial competing interests” between Granada and Palmaz Scientific. According to the notice: “Granada has told the journal that he was unaware that Palmaz Scientific allegedly awarded him restrictive stock in 2013, and did not receive this stock before the company was dissolved in 2016.”
Granada is the president and chief executive officer of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, part of the Skirball Center for Innovation in New York. Several of the other authors on the paper were with the group at the time the paper was published.
Neither Granada nor Palmaz responded to our requests for comment.
The study has been cited eight times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and the retraction appears to be the first for all 12 authors.
Although the journal corresponded with the authors in 2018 when the correction was issued, more correspondence took place between 2024-2025, the retraction notice says. “The authors have not responded adequately and after being notified of the journal’s continuing concerns on 30 October 2025, became unresponsive.”
When asked why Open Heart, which is co-owned by the British Cardiovascular Society and BMJ, took years to retract the paper, BMJ Group media relations manager Caroline White told Retraction Watch the publisher’s content integrity team didn’t exist when concerns were first raised.
White told us a “whistleblower” contacted the journal in 2024, which prompted an investigation. “The correspondence in 2024-5 refers to the findings of that investigation, and requests to the authors to address the remaining substantial concerns, which they failed to do,” she said.
White did not respond to our question asking who the whistleblower was. But in an email dated one day after the retraction, Helen Beynon, research integrity manager at BMJ Group, told Husten, “Thank you for bringing the concerns regarding this article to the journal’s attention.”
“The academic community has adopted the view that researchers are ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ and there is a very high standard of proving guilty,” Husten said about how many years it took to retract the paper, “but I think at some point when questions are raised, that needs to be reversed.”
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