A lung researcher is up to six retractions for problematic images.
Dilip Shah’s last academic post was at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, N.J., where he worked as a post-doc in the lab of Vineet Bhandari. While there, Shah landed first authorship on a 2020 article in the European Respiratory Journal titled “miR-184 mediates hyperoxia-induced injury by targeting cell death and angiogenesis signalling pathways in the developing lung.”
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.)
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:
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.”
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.
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 criticssay what Gundry peddles costs much more than it’s worth.)
After an outcry, Circulation flagged the published poster with the following notice:
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.
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.
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:
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.
