Category: for legal reasons

Cryptic “legal issues” lead to retraction of paper about potential Novartis alcohol abuse drug

Readers of this blog by now know that if there’s one thing that really gets us going, it’s obfuscation. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the following retraction notice from the journal Psychopharmacology, made us particularly batty:

This paper has been retracted by the author because of legal issues.

The notice refers to  “Selective activation of the metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 7 “mGluR7” attenuates acquisition, expression, and reinstatement of ethanol place preference,” was published online in late June by Amine Bahi under the heading “Original Investigation.”

Bahi is in the department of anatomy at United Arab Emirates University. He has also held positions at Yale and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Among his publications is one that involved a collaborator from Novartis (more on that in a moment). Continue reading Cryptic “legal issues” lead to retraction of paper about potential Novartis alcohol abuse drug

Retractile dysfunction? Author says journal yanked paper linking Viagra, Cialis to vision problem after legal threats

The British Journal of Ophthalmology has retracted a 2006 paper which purported to show a link between drugs for erectile dysfunction and a rare form of sudden vision loss called non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy, more commonly known as “Viagra blindness.”

That wouldn’t be terribly interesting, except for this: One of the authors of the paper, a researcher at the University of Alabama named Gerald McGwin Jr., told us that the journal retracted the article because it had become a tool in a lawsuit involving Pfizer, which makes Viagra, and, presumably, men who’d developed blindness after taking the drug:

The article just became too much of a pain in the rear end. It became one of those things where we couldn’t provide all the relevant documentation [to the university, which had to provide records for attorneys]

Ultimately, however, McGwin said that the BJO pulled the plug on the paper.

It was really the journal’s decision to take it out of the literature.

The retraction notice is mute on the reason for the retraction of the blindness paper (and, so far, our requests for comment seem to have fallen on deaf ears). Here’s all it says: Continue reading Retractile dysfunction? Author says journal yanked paper linking Viagra, Cialis to vision problem after legal threats