 |
Joachim Boldt | |
|---|---|
| Born | 29 September 1954 |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Falsifying scientific data |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Anesthesiology |
| Institutions | Ludwigshafen Hospital University of Giessen |
Joachim Boldt (born 29 September 1954 [1] ) is a German anesthesiologist who fabricated or falsified data, including those reporting clinical trial results. [2]
Boldt was previously considered to be a leading researcher of medicinal colloids. He was an advocate for the use of colloidal hydroxyethyl starch (HES) to boost blood pressure during surgery. [3] However, a meta-analysis of trials that excluded Boldt's fabricated data found that the intravenous use of hydroxyethyl starch is associated with a significant increased risk of death and acute kidney injury compared with other resuscitation solutions. [4] He was stripped of his professorship and came under criminal investigation for possible forgery of up to 90 research studies. [5]
The editors of 16 different scientific journals, including Anesthesia & Analgesia , Anaesthesia , the European Journal of Anaesthesiology , and the British Journal of Anaesthesia , allege that 89 of 102 studies published by Boldt contained research without proper institutional review board approval. [6]
On 10 November 2010 Boldt was suspended from Klinikum Ludwigshafen, a hospital in Ludwigshafen, Germany, for a scientific publication in Anesthesia & Analgesia with insufficient background research. His field of research and the publications were related to hydroxyethyl starch. [7] Some 90 studies he published were being reviewed by medical authorities in 2011. [8]
In February 2011, Boldt was stripped of his title of professor at the University of Giessen for failing to teach, and the university investigated possible charges of scientific misconduct. [9] His case was described as "possibly the biggest medical research scandal since Andrew Wakefield was struck off in 2010 for falsely claiming to have proved a link between the MMR vaccine and autism". [5]
In August 2012, the hospital released the results of the investigation: while it did not find that any patients were harmed, "in a large number of the studies investigated, the conduct of research failed to meet required standards. False data were published in at least 10 of the 91 articles examined, including, for instance, data on patient numbers/study groups as well as data on the timing of measurements". [10]
On 20 February 2013, JAMA published a meta-analysis on HES in critically ill patients. [4] Boldt had seven studies from the 1990s that had not yet been retracted. If Boldt's papers were included in the analysis no increase in mortality was apparent; but if they were excluded, mortality was seen to increase significantly with use of HES. The Boldt studies, but no others, showed an improvement with HES; all other studies showed significant risks with no benefits. It is considered that his fraudulent studies caused harm and risk to critically ill patients. [11]
An overview of the challenges that this fraud presented for the meta-analysts was published in 2013. The fraud included double publication of studies, manipulating demographic and outcome data to conceal double publication, and showing better results for a drug being tested. [12]
By 2017, 96 of Boldt's papers had been retracted. [13] In October 2018, a review highlighted additional retractions, dating back to 1986, demonstrating persistent fraud since the start of Boldt's career. Statistical analyses found that it was likely that many fraudulent papers from Boldt remained, and recommended that editors should take action. [14] However, some of Boldt's papers were not retracted until 2023. [15] As of August 2023, 199 of Boldt's research publications had been retracted [2] —a record for the author with the most retractions. [16]
Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research. It is violation of scientific integrity: violation of the scientific method and of research ethics in science, including in the design, conduct, and reporting of research.
In academic publishing, a retraction is a mechanism by which a published paper in an academic journal is flagged for being seriously flawed to the extent that their results and conclusions can no longer be relied upon. Retracted articles are not removed from the published literature but marked as retracted. In some cases it may be necessary to remove an article from publication, such as when the article is clearly defamatory, violates personal privacy, is the subject of a court order, or might pose a serious health risk to the general public.
Rosiglitazone is an antidiabetic drug in the thiazolidinedione class. It works as an insulin sensitizer, by binding to the PPAR in fat cells and making the cells more responsive to insulin. It is marketed by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) as a stand-alone drug or for use in combination with metformin or with glimepiride. First released in 1999, annual sales peaked at approximately $2.5-billion in 2006; however, following a meta-analysis in 2007 that linked the drug's use to an increased risk of heart attack, sales plummeted to just $9.5-million in 2012. The drug's patent expired in 2012.
Jon Sudbø is a Norwegian dentist, physician, and former medical researcher, who was exposed as a scientific fraudster in 2006. Over a period of several years, he fabricated results in the field of oncology which he published in leading medical journals. The article that led to his downfall, which was published in The Lancet, was based on 900 patients Sudbø had fabricated entirely. The editor of The Lancet described this as the biggest scientific fraud conducted by a single researcher ever.
Brian Wansink is an American former professor and researcher who worked in consumer behavior and marketing research. He was the executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) from 2007 to 2009 and held the John S. Dyson Endowed Chair in the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell University, where he directed the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.
Hydroxyethyl starch (HES/HAES), sold under the brand name Voluven among others, is a nonionic starch derivative, used as a volume expander in intravenous therapy. The use of HES on critically ill patients is associated with an increased risk of death and kidney problems.
Peter Christian Gøtzsche is a Danish physician, medical researcher, and former leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration and has written numerous reviews for the organization. His membership in Cochrane was terminated by its Governing Board of Trustees on 25 September 2018. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gøtzsche was criticised for spreading disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
Scott S. Reuben is an American anesthesiologist who falsified data heralding the benefits of the Pfizer pain medication Celebrex while downplaying its negative side effects.
Harald Walach is a German parapsychologist and advocate of alternative medicine.
Retraction Watch is a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers and on related topics. The blog was launched in August 2010 and is produced by science writers Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. Its parent organization is the Center for Scientific Integrity, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Anil Potti is a physician and former Duke University associate professor and cancer researcher, focusing on oncogenomics. He, along with Joseph Nevins, are at the center of a research fabrication scandal at Duke University. On 9 November 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Potti had engaged in research misconduct. According to Potti's voluntary settlement agreement with ORI, Potti can continue to perform research with the requirement of supervision until year 2020, while he "neither admits nor denies ORI's findings of research misconduct." As of 2020 Potti, who is employed at the Cancer Center of North Dakota, has had 11 of his research publications retracted, one publication has received an expression of concern, and two others have been corrected.
Yoshitaka Fujii is a Japanese researcher in anesthesiology, who in 2012 was found to have fabricated data in at least 219 scientific papers, of which 183 have been retracted.
The Séralini affair was the controversy surrounding the publication, retraction, and republication of a journal article by French molecular biologist Gilles-Éric Séralini. First published by Food and Chemical Toxicology in September 2012, the article presented a two-year feeding study in rats, and reported an increase in tumors among rats fed genetically modified corn and the herbicide RoundUp. Scientists and regulatory agencies subsequently concluded that the study's design was flawed and its findings unsubstantiated. A chief criticism was that each part of the study had too few rats to obtain statistically useful data, particularly because the strain of rat used, Sprague Dawley, develops tumors at a high rate over its lifetime.
Invalid science consists of scientific claims based on experiments that cannot be reproduced or that are contradicted by experiments that can be reproduced. Recent analyses indicate that the proportion of retracted claims in the scientific literature is steadily increasing. The number of retractions has grown tenfold over the past decade, but they still make up approximately 0.2% of the 1.4m papers published annually in scholarly journals.
Annarosa Leri is a medical doctor and former associate professor at Harvard University. Along with former professor Piero Anversa, Leri was engaged in biomedical research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Since at least 2003 Anversa and Leri had investigated the ability of the heart to regenerate damaged cells using cardiac stem cells.
Jonathan Neal Pruitt is a former academic researcher. He was an Associate Professor of behavioral ecology and Canada 150 Research Chair in Biological Dystopias at McMaster University. Pruitt's research focused primarily on animal personalities and the social behavior of spiders and other organisms.
Surgisphere is an American healthcare analytics company established in 2008 by Sapan Desai. Originally a textbook marketing company, it came under scrutiny in May 2020 after it provided large datasets of COVID-19 patients that were subsequently found to be unreliable. The questionable data were used in studies published in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine in May 2020, suggesting that COVID-19 patients on hydroxychloroquine had a "significantly higher risk of death". In light of these studies, the World Health Organization decided to temporarily halt global trials of the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. After the studies were retracted, the WHO trials were resumed and then discontinued shortly after.
Abida Sophie Jamal is a Canadian endocrinologist and former osteoporosis researcher who was at the centre of a scientific misconduct case in the mid-to-late 2010s. Jamal published a high-profile paper suggesting that the heart medication nitroglycerin was a treatment for osteoporosis, and was later demonstrated to have misrepresented her results. She received a lifetime ban from receiving funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and was named directly in their disclosure report, becoming the first person mentioned by name by the institute for scientific misconduct. Jamal was later stripped of her medical license for two years, regaining it in a controversial 3–2 decision.
Terminal digit preference, terminal digit bias, or end-digit preference is a commonly-observed statistical phenomenon whereby humans recording numbers have a bias or preference for a specific final digit in a number. In medical science, this is often seen when recording measurements such as blood pressure by hand, where those taking measurements will round to the nearest 5 or 0. The phenomenon has been blamed for misdiagnoses. Terminal digit bias has been used to identify errors in research, and is one method used in the identification of scientific fraud. Severe terminal digit bias has been found in datasets for scientific papers that were later retracted
50 Items Displayed Out of 199 Item(s) Found (search on 9 August 2023)
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
