clinical study retractions – Retraction Watch

Exclusive: Providence VA hires scientist previous employer found had harassed mentees

The University of Iowa found a cardiology researcher violated multiple of its policies, including harassing his former mentees when they tried to leave his lab to establish labs of their own, according to an investigation report obtained by Retraction Watch.

The researcher, Kaikobad Irani, left the school last month with a six-figure settlement, and has a new job lined up, Retraction Watch has learned.

Irani studies the molecular mechanisms of the function and dysfunction of blood vessels. He’s listed as an inventor on four patents, including an active one regarding a compound that could lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

One of Irani’s active grants names the Providence VA Medical Center as the awardee organization. A spokesperson for the VA Providence Healthcare System confirmed Irani “is in the process of onboarding and is expected to begin working around November.”

First paper retracted in string of studies using the wrong medication name

A scientific sleuth and a mother who nearly lost her daughter to a hormonal condition teamed up in January to flag a series of papers that misnamed a medication for pregnant women. They have recently started to see the fruits of their labors: one retraction and three corrections.

In 2014, Tara Skopelitis, a lab manager at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was given weekly progesterone injections to prevent preterm birth for her daughter, as reported by STAT. Six years later, after her daughter showed symptoms of an unknown hormonal condition which still hasn’t been formally diagnosed, Skopelitis discovered she should have received synthetic progesterone variant 17α-hydroxyprogesterone caproate, often referred to as 17-OHPC, 17P, sold as Makena. When the drug wasn’t available, her doctor had ordered the wrong replacement from a compounding pharmacy. Skopelitis suspects her daughter’s condition could be a result of the mixup.

The confusion lies within the literature, Skopelitis says: Many clinical trials and papers refer to 17P as intramuscular progesterone, as if they are interchangeable or even the same compound.

‘Coding’ errors prompt retraction of paper on long COVID in kids

JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a controversial 2023 paper on the incidence of long COVID in children after the authors discovered a raft of “coding” errors in their analysis that greatly underestimated the risk of the condition.

The article – a research letter titled “Post–COVID-19 Condition in Children” – was written by a group of researchers in Canada led by Lyndsey Hahn, of the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. It has been cited eight times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and garnered significant attention on mainstream and social media sites, including by critics who said the authors fatally botched the definition of long COVID.

According to the authors, the incidence of long covid in kids was “strikingly low”, occurring in just 0.4% of young patients. Symptoms of infection in kids typically resolve within two weeks, they added.

But those reassuring findings hinged on several errors in the analysis that made the incidence of long COVID in children look less than a third of what the researchers should have reported.

‘A proper editor would be horrified’: Why did a pediatric journal publish articles on the elderly?

In June, a scientist researching sarcopenia came across a relevant paper about treatment for elderly patients with complications from the disease as well as type 2 diabetes. The paper was “very bad,” he told us. “It looked like someone just copied two or three times the same text.”

The scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, became even more concerned when he realized the paper, which had the word “elderly” in its title, had been published in a pediatric journal.

“I started reading other issues of the same journal and noticed that this is a widespread problem: Chinese papers about older adults being published in pediatric journals!” he said.

Paper recommending vitamin D for COVID-19 retracted four years after expression of concern

A paper that purported to find vitamin D could reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms has been retracted from PLOS ONE, four years after the journal issued an expression of concern about the research.

The article, “Vitamin D sufficiency, a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at least 30 ng/mL reduced risk for adverse clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19 infection,” appeared online September 25, 2020. Michael F. Holick, a professor of medicine at Boston University and a proponent of the use of vitamin D, was the last author among a group of other researchers from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran.

Soon after publication, the paper gained traction on platforms like Twitter (now X) as evidence vitamin D could treat COVID-19 symptoms.

Amidst this discussion, Nick Brown, a science integrity researcher at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, a research fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia, pointed out potential flaws with the work, including the small sample size of the study and a lack of patient information such as how the patients died.

Elsevier reopens investigation into controversial hydroxychloroquine-COVID paper

A March 2020 paper that helped spur the discredited claim hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19 is under investigation – again – after some of its authors asked to take their names off the article.

The lead author, retired researcher Didier Raoult, has 12 retractions, according to The Retraction Watch Database. Those retractions involved violations of ethics rules. Journals are investigating many other articles by Raoult and his colleagues, including their work on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID.

The paper, “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial,” was published in the International Journal for Antimicrobial Agents. It has been cited more than 3,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Expression of concern coming for paper some used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths

The journal BMJ Public Health is placing an expression of concern on a paper it said “gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding,” namely, “claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality.”

The article, “Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022,” appeared online June 3, and quickly attracted attention and criticism. The expression of concern is not yet live.

In their conclusions, the authors wrote:

Lack of permits, ‘selective’ data halt research at Swedish prosthetics research center

In the late afternoon at a conference in Cartagena last year, a team of Swedish researchers presented their work on a technique that uses machine learning to translate the body’s own electric signals used to move a limb. They had tested it on a minor recovering from a stroke.

Documents from an internal investigation shared by Chalmers University have now revealed, however, that this case study was part of a series of regulatory lapses and suspicious research practices at the Centre for Bionics and Pain Research (CBPR) where the clinical research was conducted. The researchers seem to have conducted the study before Max Ortiz-Catalán, the center’s founder and former manager, had secured regulatory approval from the relevant Swedish agency.

Chalmers, the Centre’s home, has now suspended it after also suspecting that its data and research participants seemed “systematically selected” so that treatments appeared effective, and excluded data when treatments caused health problems. The investigation also uncovered the center had no person responsible for compliance, which is a requirement under Swedish law, and that personal data had been handled poorly.

Do some IQ data need a ‘public health warning?’ A paper based on a controversial psychologist’s data is retracted

A journal has retracted a controversial 2010 article on intelligence and infections that was based on data gathered decades ago by a now-deceased researcher who lost his emeritus status in 2018 after students said his work was racist and sexist.

The article, “Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability’, was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, by a group at the University of New Mexico. Their claim, according to the abstract:

The worldwide distribution of cognitive ability is determined in part by variation in the intensity of infectious diseases. From an energetics standpoint, a developing human will have difficulty building a brain and fighting off infectious diseases at the same time, as both are very metabolically costly tasks.

Overlaying average national IQ with parasitic stress, they found “robust worldwide” correlations in five of six regions of the globe:

Iran COVID-vaccine paper with ‘serious flaws’ retracted

Following criticism from scientists around the world, a virology journal has retracted a paper describing the first test in humans of an Iran-made vaccine against COVID-19.

Iran licensed the home-grown Noora vaccine for emergency use in 2022 and has reportedly administered millions of doses to its citizens. The country’s health authorities say the shot is 94% effective.

The now-retracted paper, published in 2022 in the Journal of Medical Virology, was the only report on the clinical development of the vaccine to have appeared in an international journal. The article has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

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