clinical study retractions – Page 3

Paper that helped form basis of pricy research tool retracted

Nearly four years after a critic pointed out flaws in a paper about a controversial research tool involved in nearly 20 retractions, the owner of that instrument has lost the article after he failed to overcome the editors’ concerns about the work.

The owner is Donald Morisky, of the University of California, Los Angeles, whose name should be well-familiar to readers of Retraction Watch.

Morisky developed the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), then began charging researchers up to six-figure sums to license the use of the tool in their own studies. Those who didn’t sign agreements in advance were ordered to retract their papers that used the MMAS, pay Morisky’s company retroactively, or risk legal action. (We wrote about all this in Science back in 2017. We also wrote about how Morisky and his former business partner, Steve Trubow, have been engaged in litigation over ownership of a spin-off “widget” Trubow says belongs to him. That case is ongoing.)

Outcry over ‘terminal anorexia’ response letter prompts retraction

The authors of a response to an article critiquing the use of the term “terminal anorexia” retracted their letter last month after receiving major backlash from researchers, healthcare providers, and people with eating disorders.

“Regardless of inequities in care, terminal anorexia nervosa exists: a response to Sharpe et. al,” which defended the use of the term, was published May 20 in the Journal of Eating Disorders.

The letter was a response to “Inaccessibility of care and inequitable conceptions of suffering: a collective response to the construction of “terminal” anorexia nervosa,” an article published earlier in the month in the same journal by researchers with lived experiences of eating disorders. The article outlined methodological problems with the criteria for diagnosis of a “terminal eating disorder” put forward in “Terminal anorexia nervosa: three cases and proposed clinical characteristics,” a previous paper by two of the authors of the response letter.

The response was retracted on July 17. Its retraction note reads:

University cuts anesthesiology researcher’s funding amid four retractions

An anesthesiologist who had his funding revoked for fabricating data has earned a fourth retraction for publishing the same data in two Springer Nature journals.

Wen-fei Tan, an anesthesiologist at The First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, is the first author of the recently retracted paper “Changes in the first postoperative night bispectral index of patients after thyroidectomy with different types of primary anesthetic management: a randomized controlled trial,” published in the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing (JCMC), a Springer Nature journal, in 2017. It has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice states:

Highly cited Lancet long COVID study retracted and republished

One of the first studies of long COVID has been retracted and replaced seven months after editors marked it with an expression of concern citing “data errors.”

The original paper, “6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study,” was published in The Lancet in January 2021. It was “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19, according to an editorial published simultaneously, and has been cited more than 2,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The World Health Organization, for example, cited it in several documents.

Last November, the article received an expression of concern stating that a researcher had contacted the journal about inconsistencies between that study and a paper published in August 2021, also in The Lancet, describing the same cohort of patients after one year of follow up.

‘Compromised’ survey data leads to article retraction and university investigation

An article based on results from an online survey has been retracted for data issues, and an Australian university is investigating what happened.

The article, “International nursing students’ perceptions and experiences of transition to the nursing workforce – A cross-sectional survey,” became available online on Jan. 29, 2022.

Published in the journal Nurse Education in Practice, the study reported 110 responses to an online survey of nursing students who came to Australia from other countries and planned to remain there to work.

The retraction notice, posted this month, stated:

Australian study supporting mask mandates earns expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for an Australian study that supported mask mandates after researchers raised several potential problems with the design and methodology of the study.

The article, “The introduction of a mandatory mask policy was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 cases in a major metropolitan city,” was published in the journal PLOS ONE in July 2021. It has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In comments to Retraction Watch, the authors of the paper stood by their work, but a key critic said he still thought the work should have been retracted.

Author denies Chinese censorship prompted COVID-19 retraction

The corresponding author of a recently published – and then quickly retracted – letter in The Lancet decrying the failure of the Chinese Ministry of Health to pay doctors and other health care workers says authorities did not pressure him to withdraw the piece.

The letter begins:

As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end in China, medical personnel who have worked tirelessly to fight the omicron (B.1.1.529) variant are now facing a new challenge. Despite their heroic efforts, many of them are now struggling to receive the financial compensation they deserve.

The second sentence cites a blog post on Weixin.

‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

Eric Ross was listening to a popular psychiatry podcast one day last spring when “some pretty remarkable” research findings caught his attention.

A team of researchers in Egypt had shown that adding a cheap diabetes drug—metformin—to antidepressant therapy nearly doubled the treatment’s efficacy in people with moderate to severe depression. That meant the drug worked better than electric shock therapy, an option when antidepressants fail. It was a breakthrough.

“I thought, you know, wow, this is something that I’m comfortable prescribing that could make a huge difference for my patients,” said Ross, who at the time was doing his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

But when he looked up the study, he discovered several oddities. For instance, the number of patients who experienced an adverse event differed by exactly one for 17 out of 18 single events like fatigue or bloating. That seemed unlikely to have occurred by chance. And all of the scores of statistical tests the authors had done turned out just the way they would have wanted, a dream that rarely comes true in biomedical sciences.

Prominent Korean heart doctor earns two retractions in a month

Two Korean journals last month pulled papers by a prominent cardiologist at Yonsei University, Professor Hui-Nam Pak, with one retraction notice citing “issues related to scientific misconduct.”

Commenters on PubPeer had raised several concerns about data integrity, “mixed-up” data and “statistical nonsense” in “eNOS3 Genetic Polymorphism Is Related to Post-Ablation Early Recurrence of Atrial Fibrillation,” which was published in 2015 in Yonsei Medical Journal. The journal retracted the paper on January 19, noting that “we have recently become aware of a number of issues related to scientific misconduct.”

The article was coauthored by Patrick Ellinor, acting chief of cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Publisher investigating “serious concerns” about article on ivermectin, COVID, and the microbiome

The publisher Frontiers has published an expression of concern for an article that proposed “ivermectin protects against COVID-19” via effects on the microbiome.

The article, “Microbiome-Based Hypothesis on Ivermectin’s Mechanism in COVID-19: Ivermectin Feeds Bifidobacteria to Boost Immunity,” was published in July 2022 in Frontiers in Microbiology. The sole author, Sabine Hazan, is affiliated with ProgenaBiome, a company based in Ventura, Calif. that “spearheads the movement of validating, verifying, and clinically applying its sequencing data, to better understand the microbiome.”

The abstract of the article stated:

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