A study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in June 2019 has now been retracted as the journal has found the results to be ‘unreliable’.
Push-back from the scientific community
Since the study was released it has been criticised by the scientific community as they felt it had been based on misleading data.
Brad Rodu, a tobacco control expert at the University of Louisville, has been the biggest voice speaking out against the paper, and was ultimately the catalyst for getting it retracted.
The study, called ‘Electronic Cigarette Use and Myocardial Infarction Among Adults in the US Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health’ by Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz, claimed that the risk of heart complications was the same when using an e-cigarette as when smoking.
The scientific community quickly identified flaws in the study, namely that it was not clear if the subjects had had heart attacks before or after commencing use of an e-cigarette, and did not recognise that their previous and possibly even current tobacco smoking could have skewed the results.
Last month, a group of public health scholars from various schools such as Yale and King’s College London wrote a letter to the journal bringing attention to Brad Rodu’s criticism of the study and requesting that the investigate.
Overdue action
It has since transpired that during the peer-review process someone raised this same issue, but the study was published nonetheless and the journal gave Glantz and Bhatta a deadline to revise the findings. They did not meet this deadline.
It has also been revealed that, of the 38 patients participating in the study that had had a heart attack, most had one an average of 10 years before they commenced the use of an e-cigarette.
The Journal of the American Heart Association has now taken the action to retract the study with immediate effect. However, the study was picked up quickly by the media after publication, and has already done significant damage to the US public perception of e-cigarettes.
Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University explains that he considers this to be a much wider problem;
"To me, this story simply confirms what I have been arguing for a long time: that there is a profound anti-e-cigarette bias among tobacco-control researchers, and this is precisely what caused this fiasco."
Commenting on the choice to retract the study, John Dunne, a representative from the UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) stated;
“We welcome the Journal of the American Heart Association’s decision to retract this study. Quality, peer-reviewed science consistently demonstrates the public health potential of vaping, while studies that reach unreliable conclusions such as this one risk keeping people smoking cigarettes. The duty now falls to those in the media, who have given this research and its authors a platform, to make their own urgent retractions and corrections.”
We can only hope that the damage done by this misleading study can be undone, with the appropriate retractions being made and the correct information about the benefits of making the switch from smoking to vaping being more widely reported by the media.
https://www.ahajournals.org/journal/jaha
UKVIA Statement on Retraction of the Journal of the American Heart Association’s “study” into vaping
