{"id":34483,"date":"2013-02-02T14:37:35","date_gmt":"2013-02-02T19:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?post_type=news&p=34483"},"modified":"2013-02-02T15:09:35","modified_gmt":"2013-02-02T20:09:35","slug":"european-heart-journal-retracts-main-paper-of-the-kyoto-heart-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2013\/02\/02\/european-heart-journal-retracts-main-paper-of-the-kyoto-heart-study\/","title":{"rendered":"European Heart Journal Retracts Main Paper of the Kyoto Heart Study"},"content":{"rendered":"

The editors of the\u00a0European Heart Journal<\/em>\u00a0have\u00a0retracted<\/a>\u00a0the 2009 paper reporting the main results of the\u00a0Kyoto Heart Study<\/a>, a randomized, open-label study testing the add-on effect of valsartan to conventional therapy for high-risk hypertension. The retraction notice gave no details about the problems that led to the retraction. Here is the full text of the retraction notice:<\/p>\n

“This article has been retracted by the journal. Critical problems existed with some of the data reported in the above paper. The editors of the European Heart Journal hereby retract this paper and discourage citations of it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For the past year the chief investigator of the Kyoto Heart Study,\u00a0Hiroaki Matsubara,\u00a0who had been a prominent cardiologist and researcher at Kyoto Prefectural University in\u00a0Japan\u00a0until the recent scandal,\u00a0has been under fire.\u00a0Last March<\/a>, following accusations by independent bloggers in\u00a0Japan\u00a0and\u00a0Germany, the\u00a0American Heart Association\u00a0(AHA) issued an\u00a0Expression of Concern<\/a>\u00a0about five papers published in AHA journals coauthored by Matsubara. Then,\u00a0last month<\/a>, the editor of\u00a0Circulation Journal<\/em>, the official journal of the Japanese Circulation Society (and not to be confused with the\u00a0American Heart Association’s better known\u00a0Circulation<\/em>)\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0the retraction of two substudies from\u00a0the Kyoto Heart Study. The papers, according to the editor, “contain a number of serious errors in data analysis.”<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that the Kyoto Heart Study was considered to be an important study with significant clinical implications at the time of its publication. The title of\u00a0the press release issued by the European Society of Cardiology<\/a>\u00a0upon publication of the original study was: “Valsartan reduces morbidity and mortality in Japanese patients with high risk hypertension.”<\/em><\/p>\n

At the time of the initial publication of the Kyoto Heart Study, hypertension researchers Franz Messerli,\u00a0Sripal Bangalore, and Frank Ruschitzka wrote an editorial that raised some questions about the study. Responding to today’s news of the retraction of the main study, Messerli said:<\/p>\n

\u00a0“…in our editorial we use terms like ‘somewhat surprisingly’, ‘due to chance’ and ‘somewhat difficult to believe’ to describe the findings of the Kyoto Heart Study. This clearly shows that we had difficulties in reconciling the data\u00a0 with existing evidence from other studies. I am therefore not\u00a0 surprised that the veracity of main results also turned out to be questionable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2009 report of the Kyoto Heart Study on the add-on effect of valsartan in hypertension has been retracted with a terse comment by the editors of the European Heart Journal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1658],"tags":[1480,1617,970,1478],"class_list":["post-34483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hypertension-3","tag-antihypertensive-drugs","tag-kyoto-heart-study","tag-retractions","tag-valsartan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}