December 6, 2022
According to a Medscape Nurses article published on Dec 1, 2022, “An early and influential paper on long COVID published in Jan 2021 appearing in The Lancet an expression of concern from a reader has required the journal to investigate “data errors brought to light”.
The article states, “the study was described as ‘the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up’ of people hospitalized with COVID-19. Titled “6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study, cited nearly 1,600 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Altmetric finds references to it in multiple documents from the World Health Organization”.
According to Medscape, “the expression of concern, dated November 24, a reader found inconsistencies between the data in the article and a later paper describing the same cohort of patients after a year of follow-up. That discovery sparked an investigation that is still ongoing:
On Jan 8, 2021, The Lancet published an Article, 6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study, by Chaolin Huang and colleagues. 1 On Aug 28, 2021, The Lancet published an Article, 1-year outcomes in hospital survivors with COVID-19: a longitudinal cohort study, by Lixue Huang and colleagues. 2 We received an inquiry from a researcher on data inconsistencies between these two Articles, and we sought an explanation from the corresponding author of the two papers. On Nov 7, 2022, Lancet editors were informed that inconsistencies between the 6-month and the 1-year data were due to “some variables in the dataset used for the 6-month paper were mistakenly disrupted in order”. In view of the extent of these data errors, we now issue an Expression of Concern about the 6-month paper 1 while we investigate further, including further statistical and clinical review of the corrected data. We will update this notice as soon as we have further information.”
Access the Full article here
The article concludes with, ” This year, The Lancet overtook the New England Journal of Medicine as the medical journal with the highest impact factor, in large part due to the papers it published about COVID-19. We’ve counted retractions for three of those papers, most notably a paper about the use of the drug hydroxychloroquine that claimed to use medical data from a company called Surgisphere. As Retraction Watch readers may remember, the article was retracted after sleuths questioned if the data were real, and the company would not produce it for review”.
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