Category: dermatology retractions

The authors of a case report involving a patient who died of a rare disorder of the bone marrow have removed an image from the article after the person’s mother objected to the use of the photograph. 

The paper, “Dyskeratosis congenita,” appeared in Autopsy Case Reports in 2020 and was written by a group from Upstate Medical University, part of the State University of New York system, in Syracuse. 

We saw the notice in November and were curious if we could learn more. So we filed a public records request for documents related to the article – and received a response last week disclosing correspondence between Robert Stoppacher, a co-author of the report, and the editor-in-chief of the journal.  

In a letter to the journal on Sept. 12, 2021, Stoppacher stated that:

Continue reading Authors blame ‘unintentional oversight’ for including image of deceased patient in paper

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:  

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

It was a paper that caught the attention — and bemusement — of Twitter:

What

(and I cannot stress this enough)

*the fuck*https://t.co/bt2d8ebryg

— Paul Byrne (@ThePlanetaryGuy) September 22, 2020

And now it is no more, along with four more articles from the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences in what was billed as a special issue on Global Dermatology.

Here’s the whole title: “A black hole at the center of earth plays the role of the biggest system of telecommunication for connecting DNAs, dark DNAs and molecules of water on 4+N- dimensional manifold.” (Be warned that the link takes you to a login.)

You may fairly wonder what a terrestrial black hole and skin diseases have in common. The abstract, which we present for posterity, sheds no, ahem, light on the question:

Continue reading “This unfortunate situation”: Journal retracts bizarre paper about a black hole at the center of Earth