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Experts have suggested that Peer-Reviewed Journal Gastroenterology Research should publish the letter that led to the recent retraction of study paper which linked smoking and e-cigarette to liver disease. This, according to them, should be done in line with the spirit of academic transparency.
A study linking nicotine vapes to liver disease has been retracted after its authors failed to address concerns about the article’s methods and findings.
Gastroenterology Research formally retracted the paper, stating that “concerns have been raised regarding the article’s methodology, source data processing including statistical analysis, and reliability of conclusions.”
One positive aspect of the retracted study titled “Association of Smoking and E-Cigarette in Chronic Liver Disease: An NHANES Study,” is that it was based on public data, allowing others to review the authors’ analyses and conclusions, said Ray Niaura, a psychologist and epidemiology professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health who studies tobacco dependence and treatment.
“If you can get reasonable people who disagree to then have an honest discussion about things that’s based on data, then to me that’s a positive outcome. The problem is we have too little of that,” Niaura further said.
To conduct their research, the authors drew from a publicly available database, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), and analyzed participants’ responses, looking for associations between liver disease and the use of cigarettes or vaping products.
The results, they claimed, showed that “e-cigarette users were associated with higher odds of having liver disease compared to non-smokers.”
The newly retracted study has 13 co-authors: Raja Chandra Chakinala, Sameer Dawoodi, Stephanie P. Fabara, Muhammad Asad, Azadeh Khayyat, Sangeetha Chandramohan, Aysha Aslam, Nkechi Unachukwu, Bibimariyam Nasyrlaeva, Richa Jaiswal, Sriram B. Chowdary, Preeti Malik, and Rizwan Rabbani.
Objections to the paper were raised in a letter to the journal’s editor-in-chief, Robert Wong, a clinical professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Critics, including advocates for tobacco harm reduction, say the retraction is only the latest example of public health researchers overstating the harms of vaping in academic literature.
One shortcoming, Niaura said, is with the NHANES data itself. The only survey question on vaping is extremely broad, asking: “Have you ever used an e-cigarette?” By comparison, questions involving combustible tobacco include “Do you now smoke cigarettes?” and whether someone has smoked “at least 100 cigarettes” in their life. “That’s kind of a weak variable,” Niaura said of the vaping question. “What does it mean? It doesn’t mean much.”
“Right from the get-go, when e-cigarettes became a thing and the object of research interest, it appeared that everyone was out to discover their potential harms, and that’s continued,” Niaura said. “Then some people started scratching the surface and saying, ‘Maybe these studies are not so good.”
The ideological divides are sometimes stark. “It’s very frustrating because if you start being critical of many of these studies, you get accused of working for the tobacco industry, for example,” Niaura said. “But in fact—and I’m part of the group that’s very critical—it’s really just standing up for science.”
Experts argue that a major worry is that once a flawed study is published, it’s difficult to ensure that the findings aren’t repeated elsewhere, whether in other papers, in meta-analyses that aggregate multiple articles, or in popular media.
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