clinical study retractions – Page 8

Paper from company claiming phototherapy could treat COVID-19 is retracted

A study that touted phototherapy as a way to combat the COVID-19 pandemic has been retracted after Elisabeth Bik noted a litany of concerns about the article, from duplications in the figures to the authors’ failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

The article, “Methylene blue photochemical treatment as a reliable SARS-CoV-2 plasma virus inactivation method for blood safety and convalescent plasma therapy for COVID-19,” appeared in mid-April in BMC Infectious Diseases, a Springer Nature title. Unlike many papers rushed into publication during the pandemic, it had been in peer review since the previous April. The authors listed affiliations with various institutions in China, including a company called Boxin (Beijing) Biotechnology Development LTD, which helped fund the study — more on that in a moment.

According to the paper, methylene blue (a versatile medical product that serves as a drug and a dye) when used with something called the “BX-1 AIDS treatment instrument,” could be a wonder therapy for the SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The authors describe BX-1 as:

‘They seem to mean business’: Cardiology journal flags papers cited hundreds of times

A European cardiology journal has issued expressions of concern for seven widely-cited papers dating back to 2009 after a reader flagged suspicious images in the articles.

Although the cast of characters changes, the senior author on all seven papers is Chao-Ke Tang, of the First Affiliated Hospital of the University of South China, in Hengyang, Hunan. To date, at least 15 of Tang’s papers have come under scrutiny on PubPeer. Two months ago, for example, Elisabeth Bik posted about “unexpected similarities” in multiple figures in a 2013 paper by Tang and colleagues that appeared in PLoS ONE.

But Sander Kersten, the chair of Nutrition, Metabolism and Genomics and Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, said he believes that the researcher’s output for roughly the past decade is unreliable.

Kersten said his concerns about Tang date back to 2014, when he reviewed — negatively — a manuscript for Atherosclerosis, an Elsevier title, from the researcher:

Authors of widely panned study of masks in children respond to critics

The authors of a paper claiming that children’s masks trap concentrations of carbon dioxide higher than allowable standards in Germany have responded to critics who said the study was plagued with poor methods and unreasonable conclusions.

As we reported earlier this week, the corresponding author of the paper, Harald Walach, had his affiliation with Poznan University in Poland terminated because of a different paper he had co-authored, in the journal Vaccines. That paper has been retracted.

In the response, which we’ve made available in full here, Walach and his co-authors on the masks paper in JAMA Pediatrics write that

University terminates affiliation with researcher who had paper on COVID-19 vaccines retracted as mask study comes under scrutiny

A researcher who co-authored a now-retracted paper claiming that two vaccinated people died of COVID-19 for every three deaths prevented has had an affiliation with a Polish university terminated.

Yesterday, Poznan University tweeted about the researcher, Harald Walach:

We wish to emphasize that the claims included in dr Harald Walach’s recent article in @Vaccines_MDPI do not represent the position of @PUMS_tweets. We find that the article lacked scientific diligence and proper methodology. Dr. Walach’s affiliation with PUMS was now terminated.
— Poznan University of Medical Sciences (@PUMS_tweets) July 6, 2021

Today, it confirmed the move in a statement:

‘A costly mistake’ prompts retraction of paper on hair loss

Image by Martin Slavoljubovski from Pixabay

A “costly mistake” has led to the retraction of a paper by a team of dermatology researchers in West Virginia who failed to obtain permission to use the data in their study for the specific purpose for which it was used.

The article, “Association Between Alopecia Areata and Natural Hair Color Among White Individuals,” which appeared in March 2021 in JAMA Dermatology, was a case-control study based on data from the UK Biobank — a large repository of medical and genetic data from people in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the article was Michael Kolodney, the chair of the department of dermatology at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown.

In fact, Kolodney and his colleagues had produced two articles using data from the biobank: one on alopecia areata — an autoimmune condition that causes relatively early-onset hair loss — and another that linked baldness to an increased risk of Covid-19 in men. The Covid research was published in November 2020 as a letter to the editor in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

The Covid paper remains intact. But as the retraction notice indicates, the folks at UK Biobank hadn’t granted Kolodney’s group permission to publish the alopecia findings:

Meet a sleuth whose work has led to the identification of hundreds of fraudulent papers

Last month, Retraction Watch reported on the case of Hironobo Ueshima, an anesthesiology researcher found guilty of misconduct in more than 140 papers. A journal editor, John Loadsman, was the first to suspect there were issues in Ueshima’s work. But this was hardly the first time Loadsman had been the canary in the coal mine of the anesthesiology literature, placing him squarely on our ever-growing list of scientific sleuths that includes Elisabeth Bik, who has been in the news recently because of threats. In this Q&A, we ask Loadsman what happened in the Ueshima case, and for his sense of how big a problem fraud in the literature is.

Retraction Watch (RW): You were the editor who first spotted problems with Ueshima’s work. Walk us through how you cracked the case. What made you suspect that his data were not kosher?

Medical journal retracts article on “tribalism” after readers call it offensive

*Journal of Hospital Medicine* editor Samir Shah

A journal has retracted — and replaced — an article on “tribalism” in medicine and deleted a tweet about it, too, after readers complained that the language in the piece was offensive to Indigenous peoples.

The article, which appeared in the Journal of Hospital Medicine in April, was titled “Tribalism: The Good, The Bad, and The Future.” The authors were Zahir Kanjee and Leslie Bilello, of Harvard Medical School.

The journal used social media to promote the article — which prompted a flood of criticism about the use of the word “tribalism” and its permutations.

On May 21, Samir Shah, the editor-in-chief of JHM, and four other editors issued a statement apologizing for publishing the article:

Two meditation papers retracted for failures to report primary outcomes

A pair of psychology journals have retracted two related papers on the health benefits of a popular form of meditation after a reader pointed out that the authors failed to report the primary outcome of the study underpinning the articles.

The now-retracted articles describe the putatively salubrious effects of sahaj samadhi meditation, a form of meditation developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and promoted by the Art of Living Foundation, which describes itself thusly:

Anesthesiology researcher guilty of misconduct in more than 140 papers: Investigation

Showa University Hospital, via Wikimedia

A Japanese anesthesiologist has been found guilty of fabricating data and other misconduct in 142 articles, leading to his termination and the sanction of several of his co-authors.

Showa University says its investigation into Hironobu Ueshima, the existence of which we first reported on last June, found that the prolific researcher had doctored his results, falsified his findings and tinkered with authorship.

The university’s report on the case is available here, in Japanese, and a similar report from the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists is available here in English. The JSA report cites 142 papers — including 120 letters to the editor, 12 original papers, and 9 case reports — with evidence of misconduct including fabricated data and improper authorship. The investigation also found evidence of misconduct in several unpublished studies by Ueshima. By our count, he has six retractions to date.

‘Preprints are works in progress’: The tale of a disappearing COVID-19 paper

When a Twitter user tipped us off last week to the mysterious disappearance of a preprint of a paper on a potential new therapy to treat Covid-19, we were curious. Was it a hidden retraction, or something else?

The article, titled “Effectiveness of ZYESAMI™ (Aviptadil) in Accelerating Recovery and Shortening Hospitalization in Critically-Ill Patients with COVID-19 Respiratory Failure: Interim Report from a Phase 2B/3 Multicenter Trial,” had popped up on SSRN on April 1.

The trial was funded by NeuroRX, the maker of Zyesami, which trumpeted the results in a series of press releases dating back to February 2021. NeuroRX has been partnering with Relief Therapeutics on the development of the drug, but that marriage seems to be rather rocky.

Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist in France, tweeted that by May 10 the paper had vanished with only a trace of meta-data. As another Twitter user noted, however, the article had reappeared on the preprint server with a different title. (We see the post date on SSRN as May 11.)

We took a look at the two articles and found some interesting differences.

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