For
six months, Journal of the American Heart Association editors Drs. Barry
London (barry-london@uiowa.edu), Daniel T.
Eitzman (deitzman@umich.edu) and Janice
Weinberg (janicew@bu.edu) have refused to
correct demonstrably false research results published in the June issue. The work was authored by
Drs. Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz.
As
reported in USA Today, the study “claimed
adult vaping was ‘associated with’ a doubled risk of heart attack, but Glantz
went further in a blog post, saying the study represented ‘more evidence that
e-cigs cause heart attacks.’”
“However,
when [Dr. Brad] Rodu obtained the federal data, he found the majority of the 38
patients in the study who had heart attacks had them before they started vaping
— by an average of 10 years earlier. In his [two] letter[s] to the editors [here and here], Rodu called
Glantz's findings ‘false and invalid…Their analysis was an indefensible breach
of any reasonable standard for research on association or causation…We urge you
to take appropriate action on this article, including retraction.’”
O’Donnell’s
article continued, “the American Heart Association says it follows the
Committee on Publication Ethics [COPE] guidelines, meaning editors ask the
author to respond to any questions brought to its attention… The journal may
revise the publication record, if it's determined necessary.”
However,
the journal editors never responded to me in a substantive manner. In October, the journal sent me an unresponsive
letter about COPE guidelines.
The letter was unsigned, a discourtesy suggesting that the editors found
our objections unworthy of consideration.
In
November, I invited the broad research community to counter the
falsified research;
that blog post has been viewed over 2,300 times. Andrew Gelman, widely respected professor of
statistics and political science, and director of Columbia University’s Applied
Statistics Center, conducted his own analysis.
He commented in his
blog
that “Rodu’s criticism seems more serious. Bhatta and Glantz are making causal claims
based on correlation between heart problems and e-cigarette use…It seems like a
real article with a data issue that Rodu found, and the solution would seem to
be to perform a corrected analysis removing the data from the people who had
heart problems before they started vaping.”
Dr.
Gelman’s comment was followed by a January 20 letter from 16 prominent tobacco
researchers, led by Dr. David Abrams of the New York University, to the JAHA
editors (here). Abrams and colleagues
wrote that the Rodu and Gelman analyses suggest “that the published findings
are unreliable and that there is a case to answer…a proper investigation and
response.”
Three days later,
the editors sent a reply that was a Xerox copy of their October unsigned (non)response
to me (here).
Abrams
et al. pushed back. In a January 29 letter they said the editors’
correspondence “does not amount to a substantive response to the concerns we
raised about (1) critical failures in the published paper…(2) the conduct of
[Bhatta and Glantz] in failing to make adjustments to their analysis with data
they knew were available…(3) the process followed by the journal in the light
of the whistleblower complaint made by Dr. Brad Rodu in July 2019…” The Abrams group noted that the journal is
not in compliance with COPE guidelines, and they bluntly ask the editors:
“Does
the journal accept the findings are unreliable and what does the journal
propose to do about the published paper?
Can you confirm whether there is or has been an investigation into this
complaint, outline its current status and set out the outcome of the
investigation if there is one so far?”
Documentation
regarding this academic misfeasance is available at this PubPeer link.
