clinical study retractions – Page 10

Journal retracts paper by ‘miracle doctor’ claiming life force kills cancer cells

A “miracle doctor” in China and his colleagues have lost a 2007 paper on the ability of the martial art qigong to treat cancer after the journal that published the work said it failed to properly vet the findings.

Well, the first part of that is true. The second part is implied. We’ll explain.

The paper, “External Qi of Yan Xin Qigong induces G2/M arrest and apoptosis of androgen-independent prostate cancer cells by inhibiting Akt and NF-B pathways,” appeared in December 2007 in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, a Springer Nature journal. It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The first author on the study was Yan Xin, whose biography states that he is a “miracle doctor” and one of the world’s experts in the healing properties of qi — the universal life force in traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy. His co-authors include researchers at Harvard, McMaster University in Canada, and the New Medical Science Research Institute in New York City.

‘Unfair and unsubstantiated’: Journal retracts paper suggesting smoking is linked to lower COVID-19 risk

A paper suggesting that smokers were significantly less likely than nonsmokers to contract Covid-19 has been retracted because the authors failed to disclose financial ties to … the tobacco industry.

The article, which appeared as a preprint and then as an “early view” in the European Respiratory Journal last July, came from a group at the University of Piraeus, in Greece, and the University of Utah. The first author was Theodoros Giannouchos, currently a post-doc at the University of Utah, and the senior author was Konstantinos Farsalinos, a fairly prominent name in the world of vaping research.

Some vaping advocates have pointed to a protective effect of nicotine against Covid-19. According to the preprint of the now-retracted paper:

Palmitoleic acid paper pulled for data concerns

A journal has retracted the 2014 report of a clinical trial of a supplement touted as a way to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease after beginning to suspect that the data were not reliable.

The study, “Purified palmitoleic acid for the reduction of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and serum lipids: A double-blinded, randomized, placebo controlled study,” was published in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology, an Elsevier title. It has been cited 42 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The authors were Adam Bernstein and Michael Roizen, of the Wellness Institute at Cleveland Clinic, and Luis Martinez, who at the time was the president of the Xyrion Medical Institute, in Puerto Rico.

Roizen, an anesthesiologist and the founding chair of the Wellness Institute, is the co-creator of the RealAge test, which he developed along with Mehmet Oz.

Roizen and Oz have been hawking palmitoleic acid — an omega-7 fatty acid that is the subject of the now-retracted study — for some time. In this 2019 article, for example, the pair wrote:

A longtime whistleblower explains why he’s spent more than a decade trying to get a paper retracted

Since the report of the MIST Trial was published in Circulation in 2008, I have repeatedly written to the journal to express concern about the paper.

Most recently, on February 22, I wrote to the editor-in-chief of Circulation, which is owned by the American Heart Association (AHA), requesting that they retract the 2008 MIST Trial paper, the revised version of the paper, the correction and the data supplement. The response two days later was from the senior attorney of the AHA: “AHA respectfully declines any further involvement. We consider this matter closed and we will not pursue additional comment or review.”

Let me explain how I got involved, and why I have persisted. I was the principal cardiologist in the MIST Trial sponsored by NMT Medical. Another member of the steering committee (Simon Nightingale) and I refused to be authors of the paper because NMT had refused to allow any investigator to see all the data but even without access to the data it was clear that the paper made false claims. In November 2007, a few days after we refused to be authors, NMT started legal proceedings for libel and slander against me. They also instructed their lawyers to sue Nightingale, but did not start the legal proceedings against him.

Paper claiming Muslim patients are “particularly sensitive” retracted

A paper about medical treatment for migrant patients in Germany has been retracted after the authors made unsupported claims that Muslims are “particularly sensitive” to pain.

The paper, titled “Diversität im klinischen Alltag der Augenheilkunde,” or “Diversity in everyday clinical practice in ophthalmology,” in English, was published in Der Ophthalmologe, a German medical journal, in November 2019. It has not yet been cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The original article, penned by ophthalmologists at the Cologne University Eye Clinic, is in German. We ran it through Google Translate to get a sense of its content. The paper begins with a case study of a 52 year-old Turkish migrant, explains how to use smartphone speech translators to overcome language barriers, and highlights cultural differences that physicians should consider while treating migrants.

Former Cleveland Clinic researcher’s papers “more likely than not” included falsified images, says investigation

A former researcher at the Cleveland Clinic who studied cardiac genetics has lost three papers for what an institutional investigation concluded was “more likely than not” a case image falsification.

As we reported last year, the work of Subha Sen, once a highly funded scientist at Cleveland Clinic but who left the institution in 2011, has come under scrutiny on PubPeer (note: a researcher with the same name, but at a different institution, also appears in these search results). With the latest papers, Sen now has ~~nine~~ seven retractions for issues including questions about the integrity of the data and the validity of the images.

The three newest removals involve studies published in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology between 2004 and 2009. The notices are very similar while referring to different images.

Here’s the statement for the 2005 article, “Inhibition of NF-κB induces regression of cardiac hypertrophy, independent of blood pressure control, in spontaneously hypertensive rats”:

Widely shared vitamin D-COVID-19 preprint removed from Lancet server

A preprint promoted by a member of the UK Parliament for claiming to show that vitamin D led to an “80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths” has been removed from a server used by The Lancet family of journals.

The preprint, “Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes,” was posted to Preprints with The Lancet on January 22. On February 13, David Davis, a Conservative member of UK’s Parliament, tweeted:

Leading evidence-based group blames pandemic for 9-month delay pulling flawed cancer review

Last February, Richard Pollock was reading a review in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews — a prominent resource for evidence-based medicine — when he spotted an error.

In the first figure, which compared the effectiveness of two different treatments for the most common form of liver cancer, a label was switched. The error made it seem like the “worse” treatment was better than the more effective option.

Pollock, a health economist, was concerned enough to send an email to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the corresponding author, on February 20th. Abdel-Rahman, an oncologist at the University of Alberta, wrote back the next day, saying he would review the comments with experts at Cochrane, “and if there is any typos in the publication, it will be corrected immediately.” Emails seen by Retraction Watch show that, when replying to this email, Abdel-Rahman copied one of Cochrane’s editors, Dimitrinka Nikolova.

Months passed. Pollock sent another email to Abdel-Rahman and two Cochrane editors — Nikolova and Christian Gluud — on June 15th. Then, on November 16th, the journal pulled the review with a brief notice:

Exercise science grad student at Australian university dismissed after he admitted faking data, says supervisor

A physiology journal has retracted a pair of papers from a group in Australia after learning that the flawed work was the subject of an institutional investigation.

The articles, both of which were published last year in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, came from a group at the Murdoch Applied Sports Science Laboratory, part of Murdoch University. The first author on both papers was Liam J. Hughes, a PhD student at Murdoch who was terminated as a result of the misconduct.

JAMA journal retracts its first paper, on exercise and heart disease

The authors of a 2019 meta-analysis in a JAMA journal on exercise and heart disease have retracted the paper after discovering that a quarter of the studies they’d used in the analysis did not belong.

The retraction is the first for the journal, which had published some 2,800 articles before having to pull one, Frederick P. Rivara, the editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. One in 2,800, we should note, is quite close to the 4 in 10,000 rate of retraction in the overall literature.

The study, from a group at the Universities of Manchester and Brighton, in the United Kingdom, was titled “Accelerometer- and pedometer-based physical activity interventions among adults with cardiometabolic conditions: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” and appeared in JAMA Network Open.

The authors, led by Alexander Hodkinson, looked at 36 randomized clinical trials and found that:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: