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The Lancet announced today that it has retracted a highly cited study that suggested hydroxychloroquine may cause more harm than benefit in patients with COVID-19. Hours later, the New England Journal of Medicine announced that it had retracted a second article by some of the same authors, also on heart disease and COVID-19.
The Lancet article, titled "Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis" was originally published online May 22. The NEJM article, "Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in Covid-19" was initially published May 1.
Three authors of The Lancet article, Mandeep R. Mehra, MD, Frank Ruschitzka, MD, and Amit N. Patel, MD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, write in a letter that the action came after concerns were raised about the integrity of the data, and about how the analysis was conducted by Chicago-based Surgisphere Corp and study coauthor Sapan Desai, MD, Surgisphere's founder and CEO.
The authors asked for an independent third-party review of Surgisphere to evaluate the integrity of the trial elements and to replicate the analyses in the article.
"Our independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis, as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements," the authors write.
Therefore, reviewers were not able to conduct the review and notified the authors they would withdraw from the peer-review process.
The Lancet said in a statement: "The Lancet takes issues of scientific integrity extremely seriously, and there are many outstanding questions about Surgisphere and the data that were allegedly included in this study. Following guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), institutional reviews of Surgisphere's research collaborations are urgently needed."
The authors write, "We can never forget the responsibility we have as researchers to scrupulously ensure that we rely on data sources that adhere to our high standards. Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources. Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.
"We all entered this collaboration to contribute in good faith and at a time of great need during the COVID-19 pandemic. We deeply apologize to you, the editors, and the journal readership for any embarrassment or inconvenience that this may have caused."
In a similar, if briefer, note, the authors requested that the New England Journal of Medicine retract the earlier article as well. The retraction notice on the website reads: "Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate the primary data sources underlying our article, 'Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in Covid-19.'
"We therefore request that the article be retracted. We apologize to the editors and to readers of the Journal for the difficulties that this has caused."
As Medscape Medical News reported yesterday, both journals had already published "Expression of Concern" notices about the articles.
The expression of concern followed an open letter, endorsed by more than 200 scientists, ethicists, and clinicians and posted on May 28, questioning the data and ethics of the study, as reported by Medscape Medical News.
New Eng J Med. Published online June 4, 2020. Retraction
The Lancet. Published online June 4, 2020. Retraction
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Cite this: Two Journals Retract Studies on HCQ, Heart Disease in COVID-19 - Medscape - Jun 04, 2020.
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