A year later, the peer-eviewed journal, has formally retracted the paper explaining that “concerns have been raised regarding the article’s methodology, source data processing including statistical analysis, and reliability of conclusions.” The journal’s editor-in-chief, Robert Wong, explained that concerns about the validity of the findings were raised to the editor. The study authors were given time to respond and counter the concerns, but they failed to do so.
Biased studies published on reputable journals
This is not the first time a flawed vape study has been retracted. In fact renowned tobacco harm reduction researchers Riccardo Polosa, Founder of the CoEHAR, and Konstantinos Farsalinos, a cardiologist and research fellow at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Athens, had recently highlighted that numerous poor-quality vape studies are distorting scientific truth.
In their commentary “A tale of flawed e-cigarette research undetected by defective peer review process” published in Internal and Emergency Medicine, Polosa and Farsalinos, highlighted the common flaws in studies supporting an anti-vaping narrative.
For example, explain the two scientists, most studies do not consider the relevance of the timing of the event, which is crucial in determining relationships, “..cross-sectional population-based studies by design that fail to include information on the age of initiation of e-cigarette and combustible cigarette use cannot be relied on for drawing conclusions regarding potentially causal associations with typical smoking-related diseases.” What is worse, add the authors, is that editorial offices of well-known and reputable scientific journals seem to downplay this critical detail.
The authors referred to a paper by Parker et al (2020) as an example, who analyzed the Behavioral Risk factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) about the possible “risk of stroke” associated to e-cig use. The research team reported that switching from cigarettes to vapes “does not confer stroke benefits, and that e-cigarette users who were former or current cigarette smokers had significantly higher odds of stroke. The fact is that no information about the age of e-cig initiation or stroke occurrence was available within the report. Therefore, no causal inference can be applied between the two events. And this is not the only case.“
The most frequently cited vape studies are flawed
Similarly a group of international researchers under the leadership of CoEHAR, found that almost all of the 24 most frequently cited vaping studies, all published in reputable medical journals, are methodologically flawed.
Led by Dr. Cother Hajat of the United Arab Emirates University and Prof. Riccardo Polosa, founder of the CoEHAR, a group of international researchers examined 24 vape studies which are peer reviewed and often quoted.
Titled, “Analysis of common methodological flaws in the highest cited e-cigarette epidemiology research,” the review asked what the most common flaws in e-cigarette research are and how to prevent them. Sadly, the findings indicated a plethora of fatal flaws in these studies, which the researchers identified, categorized, and accurately analyzed.
“Many studies lacked a clear hypothesis statement: to the extent that a hypothesis could be inferred, the methods were not tailored to address the question of interest. Moreover, main outcome measures were poorly identified, and data analysis was further complicated by failure to control for confounding factors,” read the study Abstract.
They underlined that the flaws were particularly evident with regards to the Gateway Theory, explaining that related results and discussions contained numerous unreliable assertions due to poor methods. These included non-relevant data collection and unfounded conclusions. The review highlighted that many researchers claimed to find causal associations without supporting these with meaningful data. Hence the discussions and conclusions of such studies were misleading.
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