clinical study retractions – Page 6

Two abstracts about unapproved heart technology retracted

A group of heart researchers have lost two meeting abstracts after, according to one of the authors, companies said the data were proprietary and couldn’t be published. But it’s not clear the companies did so.

The studies appeared in the journal Heart Rhythm, the official journal of the Heart Rhythm Society, and were presented at the group’s 2021 annual meeting.

The first author on both abstracts was Andrea Natale, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin. We wrote about Natale in 2016, after the researcher lost a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology – again based on work he presented at the Heart Rhythm Society conference about which he raised concerns over industry meddling. (Natale disputes that he was the first author on the now-retracted posters, for reasons that aren’t clear to us.)

Researchers ‘devastated’ after finding manipulated data in study of pediatric brain tumors

An international group of cancer researchers has lost an influential 2020 paper in Nature Neuroscience after finding problems with the data that triggered an institutional investigation.

The article, “Tumor necrosis factor overcomes immune evasion in p53-mutant medulloblastoma,” represented a potentially major advance in the treatment of pediatric brain tumors, according to Robert Wechsler-Reya, the director of the Tumor Initiation & Maintenance Program at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, in La Jolla, Calif., and the senior author of the paper, which has been cited 17 times, per Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:

Exercise researcher earns more retractions as investigations mount

Co-author James Steele, one of the sleuths who brought the issues to attention

Retractions are slowly stacking up for an exercise researcher in Brazil whose work has come under scrutiny by data sleuths, including a couple of his erstwhile co-authors. The concerns prompted an investigation by his former institution into one of his academic supervisors, who may be facing sanctions, Retraction Watch has learned.

In June 2020, the sleuths posted a preprint calling for the retraction of seven papers by the researcher, Matheus Barbalho, a PhD student at the Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde, part of the Universidade da Amazônia, in Belém. The reason, according to the sleuths – who included James Steele and James Fisher, of Solent University in the United Kingdom, both of whom were co-authors on papers with Barbalho: the data were, in their view “atypical, improbable, and to put it bluntly, pretty weird.”

Since then, journals have retracted two of Barbalho’s papers (he had lost one in April 2020), citing concerns about the data in the articles.

AHA “regrets any confusion” and is reviewing meeting policies after outcry over Covid-19 vaccine abstract

Days after a leading heart journal issued an expression of concern for a meeting abstract suggesting that vaccines against Covid-19 may cause cardiac damage, its publisher, the American Heart Association (AHA), says it is reviewing how it screens such submissions.

As we reported late last month, “Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning,” was presented at the AHA’s 2021 Scientific Sessions in mid-November and was published in Circulation.

The author was Steven Gundry, a cardiac surgeon by training who now sells dietary supplements on his website. Gundry also sees patients at the Center for Restorative Medicine and International Heart & Lung Institute in California and offers advice on YouTube. (His critics say what Gundry peddles costs much more than it’s worth.)

After an outcry, Circulation flagged the published poster with the following notice:

Authors retract, resubmit “very poorly conducted” meta-analysis of COVID-19 treatment

A journal has retracted a meta-analysis on Covid-19 after concerned readers complained about the quality — or lack thereof — of the study.

The article, “A meta-analysis of granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) antibody treatment for COVID-19 patients,” appeared in Therapeutic Advances in Chronic Disease, a SAGE title.

According to the retraction notice:

Group’s second paper on potential treatments for COVID-19 is retracted

A group of researchers in Egypt have lost a second paper on possible treatments for Covid-19 after questions were raised about the legitimacy of their trial findings — and additional retractions might be coming soon.

As we reported in September, the group lost an article in Scientific Reports about a purported trial comparing favipiravir and hydroxychloroquine to treat the infection.

That move followed an expression of concern, issued in early August, for a paper in the Archives of Virology by Dabbous and his colleagues about favipiravir, titled “Efficacy of favipiravir in COVID-19 treatment: a multi-center randomized study.”

The journal has now retracted the article:

‘Clear evidence of theft’ brings down meningitis paper with dodgy images

A group of neurosurgery researchers in Tunisia have lost a 2021 case study on childhood meningitis after the editors discovered evidence of plagiarism and image manipulation.

The article, “A case of meningitis due to Achromobacter xylosoxidans in a child with a polymalformative syndrome: a case report,” appeared in the Pan African Medical Journal and was written by a team lead by Mehdi Borni, of the Department of Neurosurgery at University Hospital Center Habib Bourguiba, in Sfax.

According to the notice:

Bad MATH+? Covid treatment paper by Pierre Kory retracted for flawed results

A Wisconsin physician who has been pushing unproven treatments for Covid-19 has lost a paper on a hospital protocol his group says radically reduced deaths from the infection after one of the facilities cited in the study said the data were incorrect.

Pierre Kory, whose titles have included medical director of the Trauma and Life Support Center Critical Care Service and chief associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, in Madison, has become a key figure in the controversy over the use of ivermectin — the deworming agent that proponents insist can treat Covid-19 despite a lack of evidence that it does.

In late December 2020, Kory — who rails on Twitter about unfair and incompetent journals — and another ivermectin advocate, Paul Marik, of Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, and several other authors published a paper in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine on a group they’d created called the Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. Per the article:

Ivermectin-COVID-19 study retracted; authors blame file mixup

The authors of a study purportedly showing that ivermectin could treat patients with SARS-CoV-2 have retracted their paper after acknowledging that their data were garbled.

The paper, “Effects of a Single Dose of Ivermectin on Viral and Clinical Outcomes in Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infected Subjects: A Pilot Clinical Trial in Lebanon,” appeared in the journal Viruses in May. According to the abstract:

Four years after anesthesiology society’s request, four articles remain unretracted

Three years ago, we wrote that the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists had in 2017 asked several journals to retract a total of nine papers by Yuhji Saitoh, formerly of Yachiyo Medical Center and Tokyo Women’s Medical University.

According to the society, Saitoh had committed ethics violations in 10 articles, three of which had already been retracted and seven of which remained in the wild. (Saitoh had been a frequent co-author with Yoshitaka Fujii, currently our record holder for most retractions by a single researcher — 183 — but the JSA report found that he’d committed misconduct on his own, too. He has 53 retractions, according to our count, placing him seventh on our leaderboard.)

Four of those 10 articles appeared in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia and two others were published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. (The seventh paper, in the Fukushima Journal of Medical Sciences, has since been retracted.)

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