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Date Posted: 20:49:26 07/24/02 Wed
Author: moonotter
Subject: New England Journal of Medicine Pulls Study Due to False Photo

New England Journal of Medicine Pulls Study Due to False Photo




BOSTON (Reuters) Jul 11 - In a highly unusual move, the New England Journal of Medicine has retracted a 1998 AIDS study after concluding it included a photograph lifted from research published eight years earlier.
The journal's editor, writing in the July 11th edition, said the photograph was doctored to make it look different.

Although the photograph, taken through a microscope, had been inverted top to bottom and side to side, and then given some extra elements, other aspects of the picture turned out to be identical to a picture in a 1990 study, published in the American Journal of Cardiology. Both photos involved HIV and the heart.

"When there's a piece of data that's been called into question, we have to assume that the whole data set is questionable," Dr. Gregory Curfman, the Journal's executive editor, told Reuters on Wednesday.

Dr. Curfman said because the patterns in such photographs are as individual as a fingerprint, it now seems obvious that the image was "lifted, twisted and doctored" by someone involved with the 1998 study, conducted by the Italian Group for the Cardiological Study of Patients Afflicted with AIDS.

Dr. Curfman said the chief author of the paper, Dr. Giuseppe Barbaro, from the University LaSapienza in Rome, refused to retract the paper, insisting that the Journal could not prove the two photographs were the same.

"We didn't buy that," Dr. Curfman said. "The likelihood of having the same pattern in two separate micrographs is vanishingly small."

Instead, the Journal itself retracted the paper. Dr. Curfman said it was only the second time in his 16-year tenure at the Journal that the publication has had to retract a paper because the authors refused to do so.

Efforts to contact Dr. Barbaro in Italy were unsuccessful.

Dr. Curfman said the chief investigator of the 1990 study, Dr. Wayne Grody of UCLA School of Medicine, recognized the similarities between the images and alerted the Journal early this year.

The 1998 study was considered important because it came at a time when scientists were debating the effect of HIV on cardiac muscle. Physicians had long known that AIDS patients risked heart damage, but it was not clear whether the damage was due to the virus itself, the antiretroviral agents used, or from a side-infection that occurs in immunocompromised patients.

The photograph in the Dr. Barbaro study claimed to show the AIDS virus in heart muscle cells, and "it raised the possibility that HIV itself was toxic to the heart muscle," said Dr. Curfman.

The now-retracted paper has been cited at least 25 times in the medical research, five of those times in studies published by Dr. Barbaro and others.




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