clinical study retractions – Page 3

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One of the first studies of long COVID has been retracted and replaced seven months after editors marked it with an expression of concern citing “data errors.”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An article based on results from an online survey has been retracted for data issues, and an Australian university is investigating what happened.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:

Researchers lost five papers soon after scientists critiqued another of their papers in Retraction Watch

A microbiology research group at the University of Hong Kong lost five papers for image duplication in late October, weeks after other scientists published a critique in Retraction Watch of one of the group’s COVID-19 articles.

The paper on COVID-19 was published in Cell in 2021 and was led by Patrick Chiu Yat Woo and Kwok-Yung Yuen, chair of infectious diseases in the university’s Department of Microbiology.

Writing in Retraction Watch in early October, Robert Speth of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Michael Bader of the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, described their experience notifying Cell of numerous errors in the paper, and the journal’s editor refusing to publish a correction.

Weeks later, five of Yuen and Woo’s papers were retracted from two journals published by the American Society for Microbiology:

Professor emeritus loses fourth paper after UCSF-VA investigation, five years after other retractions

A former research center director and professor emeritus of urology has lost a fourth paper after a joint investigation by the University of California San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center found faked data in several of his articles.

The other three retractions for Rajvir Dahiya, who directed the UCSF/VAMC Urology Research Center from 1991 until his retirement in 2020, date from 2017. In addition, a paper of his in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was corrected in 2018, and one in Clinical Cancer Research received an expression of concern last year.

The latest retraction is for “Knockdown of astrocyte-elevated gene-1 inhibits prostate cancer progression through upregulation of FOXO3a activity,” published in Oncogene in 2007. It has been cited 191 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction note, like some of the other editorial notes for Dahiya’s papers, cites the findings of a joint investigation by UCSF and the VA Medical Center:

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