"Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals officially retracts the paper entitled, “LncRNA SNHG16 Promotes Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Glioma Cells Through Regulating the miR-490/PCBP2 Axis,” by Fangen Kong, Yang Yan, Jinfeng Deng, Yaoli Zhu, Yingqin Li, Huiqing Li, and Yiping Wang (Cancer Biother Radiopharm. E-pub ahead of print 23 Jul 2020; doi: 10.1089/cbr.2019.3535) at the authors' request:
“We apologized that we have found a serious problem in our paper. In fact, the Western blot experiment in our study was commissioned a third-party company for testing. In present, some peers have found that the company has forged experimental reports. After contacting the company, they were unable to provide the original images. We have checked and confirmed that the authenticity of the data provided by the company is problematic. In view of the problems in this paper, all the authors have discussed and agreed to withdraw the paper.”
The journal publisher requested the name of the “third-party company,” to which the authors replied:
“We apologize for our mistakes. Our so-called "the third party company", after further investigation, is actually not a company but an individual person. Due to the personal reasons, the previous experimental data were lost and the original raw data could not be provided. So we can not guarantee the authenticity of those data provided by that person. Some members are considering to repeat the experiment again, but we have no way to raise enough fund to repeat it. Hence after serious discussion, we decided to withdraw the manuscript.
Again we apologize sincerely for your inconvenience."
The sheer number of fraudulent papers being produced in China, sadly, is affecting the trust in research coming from there[1]:
> “The effect is devastating,” says Li, about the impacts on Chinese science. “The literature environment published in Chinese is already ruined, since hardly anyone believes them or references studies from them.”
“Now this plague has eroded into the international medical journals,” he adds. The fact that people use paper mills also affects China’s reputation globally, says Futao Huang, a Chinese researcher working at Hiroshima University in Japan.
Reputation and trust do matter, even in (what should be) objective disciplines with (what should be) reproducible experiments.
It drives me crazy how socially acceptable racism against Chinese people is on hacker news. In another thread I saw a top comment say about a paper “I won’t believe it until westerners reproduce it”. This despite several authors being based at US universities (but having Chinese names!)
Calling out a common problem with Chinese research is not racism. There is a real problem here, and it needs to be called out and fixed. That won't happen if it gets ignored by everyone.
Calling out a problem with Chinese research in general is fine. Asserting that an individual piece of research should be dismissed due to broader trends related to one’s race instead of evaluating it on its own merit is racist. And it’s even worse in this article where the comment refers to an unrelated article which has flaws that clearly don’t exist in this paper’s case (as such a study could not be a product of a paper mill). This fact should be obvious to anyone who has thought critically about the fundamental reason why racism is wrong for more than five minutes.
I think this is more like branding. When University of Phoenix was around, it had a bad brand. I wouldn’t spend much time thinking about papers written by UoP people because so many were trash. It’s possible some were good.
When it comes to academic research, China is the University of Phoenix.
It is perfectly acceptable to call out flaws in US culture, why should it be different for China? What does race have to do with it? Do you see anyone claiming that Han people are genetically predisposed to forging research papers?
When discussing US "culture", one usually has at least enough nuance to discern left from right ("us" vs "those idiots") in a population of 300 million.
When discussing China, there is no distinction. All 1.4 billion people are the same.
The more one thinks about that damn word the worse it gets. If something is problematic, the implication is that there is a “right” way, which we must all follow, and that way is determined by the speaker. It’s so childish.
No placebo control, and not even mention of limitations of the study. Of course getting into a hyperbaric chamber with even normal pressure in itself will have a cognitive effect.
It seems like it would be impossible to have a true double blind study with something like hyperbaric oxygen. Once the chamber reaches pressure, it is very obvious to the patient.
> Each treatment included 20‐minute pure oxygen inhalation (O2 = 99.9%, oxygen supply pressure 0.4 to 0.7 MPa, oxygen flow 10 to 15 L/h), 15 minutes interval, and then another 20‐minute pure oxygen inhalation (O2 = 99.9%, oxygen supply pressure 0.4 to 0.7 MPa, oxygen flow 10 to 15 L/h) under the pressure of 0.22 MPa (0.12 MPa on pressure gauge) in hyperbaric oxygen chamber (Medical Oxygen Chamber, SY3200‐8500, Yantai Hongyuan Oxygen Industrial Inc., Shandong, China).
Controls that spring to mind would be to have the chamber pressurised to a lower pressure (if you're not already familiar with hyperbaric chambers, you won't know it's at a lower pressure), or to replace the pure oxygen with normal air. Showing a dose-response relationship to pressure or oxygen concentration would go a long way towards making up for the lack of a true negative control.
I speak under correction but I think that's how diving works - high pressure air, with extra nitrogen. So the concentration of oxygen is less but the total amount is the same
I too speak under correction, but usually the nitrogen gas is actually at a lower percentage or eliminated altogether. Pressurized nitrogen causes nitrogen narcosis, so the filler gas instead is commonly helium.
Oh man, if Edward Jenner, the father of vaccinology, was alive today, he would get crucified over his discovery of the smallpox vaccine.
"What? Did you just scrape some cow's tits and inject fluid into a boy?
No control? Where the ethics approval?"
And that's probably in the Top 10 of largest advancements in medicine of all time. Luckily he did it all before the existence of armchair keyboard warriors.
Edward Jenner was hardly the father of Vaccinology. This method was long known in Indian sources.
The best source concerning the Indian method of treatment of smallpox is a report by Dr. John Z. Holwell in 1767 for the College of Physicians in London. This report is an excellent source for understanding the mind of the Ayurvedic doctors of the eighteenth century. [1]
It sounds like he wasn't even the first among his contemporaries.
But it is known for certain that in the years following 1770, at least six people in England and Germany (Sevel, Jensen, Jesty 1774, Rendall, Plett 1791) tested successfully the possibility of using the cowpox vaccine as an immunization for smallpox in humans.
I'm always happy to read about any kind of progress on AD amelioration but N = 42 is unfortunately a very small sample size to justify any potential encouraging results.
Seems very similar to [1] from a few weeks ago. Iirc the prevailing conclusion back then was that the sample set was way too small, and was absent a control group. And seems like the same is true here.
I didn't see any comparison with ambient pressure O2 treatment. Wearing a nasal cannula with 6 LPM O2 from a bottle or concentrator is easy to do at home. But nobody has a hyperbaric chamber at home. Is the hyperbaric treatment absolutely necessary and if so why?
There are two ways to increase the partial pressure of oxygen: either raise the overall pressure, or increase the concentration of oxygen (at the expense of nitrogen concentration, surely). Assuming a change in nitrogen partial pressure isn't going to interfere with things, I'd have to agree, there's not an obvious difference between the two. Maybe the researchers used a hyperbaric chamber just because they had access to a hyperbaric chamber.
A hyperbaric chamber treatment generally does both, so raises the partial pressure more than you could without it. And indeed that is what they did here.
>The anesthetic effect of air at atmospheric pressure
>Nitrogen has recognized narcotic potential at hyperbaric pressures. No narcotic effect of helium has been demonstrated at any pressure. We evaluated the effect of nitrogen in air at one atmosphere on human performance by comparing it with helium-oxygen using a four-alternative divided-attention task that requires rapid response to auditory and visual signal changes. There was a 9.3 per cent decrease in response time when subjects breathed helium-oxygen, a significant change (P less than 0.001). This change could not be ascribed to practice since the order of presentation of gases did not have a significant effect. It concluded that the nitrogen in ambient air slightly but measurable impairs human performance compared with a non-anesthetic gas such as helium.
What happened with the lsd microdosing treatment of Alzheimer? Did it do any good? Are there any follow ups on that one? There are some articles from august of last year that mention the idea, but I don't know if the trials were successful.
Oxygen is known to be toxic at high pressure. Most healthy young army recruits can withstand a pure oxygen atmosphere (at normal atmospheric pressure) for up to 24 hours before they begin to suffer adverse effects.
Astronauts could withstand the pure oxygen atmospheres in the space program because the pressure of the capsules was significantly less than 1atm.
NASA wrote a report on the toxic properties of oxygen while working on the Apollo program:
Space-cabin Atmospheres: Oxygen toxicity (1964) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728
Any benefit of high pressure oxygen treatment is short lived. People lose their metabolisms as they age. Alzheimer's is one possible result.
>> People lose their metabolisms as they age. Alzheimer's is one possible result.
Except for those with early-onset alzheimer's. And some old people never get it. So it isn't as simple as saying that old people get old. There is a specific disease at play, one that likely can be treated or even cured once we better understand the underlying causes.
>> Most healthy young army recruits can withstand a pure oxygen atmosphere
Who is still doing this? Those were phenomenally dangerous studies that I haven't heard about in decades. Outside of space suits, nobody is puts people in pure oxygen atmospheres anymore. Even hyperbaric oxygen therapy doesn't use pure O2.
At most, subjects breath pure O2 in a mask.
Nasa did worse than that. To simulate space they pressurized Apollo 1 to one atmosphere above external pressure. So they were at two atmospheres of pressure, which is ironically about the same pressure as the hyperbaric oxygen therapy used in the OP. The patients in the OP were using masks.
NASA originally spec'd a mixed gas atmosphere for Apollo, it just got too heavy. After the fire in Apollo 1, they switched to mixed-gas at launch, with this gradually bleeding out to pure O2 as the mission progressed.
This was discussed in my comment in my linked submission.
> Based on previous studies and our recent findings, we propose that hyperbaric oxygen treatment may be a promising alternative therapy for AD and aMCI.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cbr.2019.3535.retract
"Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals officially retracts the paper entitled, “LncRNA SNHG16 Promotes Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Glioma Cells Through Regulating the miR-490/PCBP2 Axis,” by Fangen Kong, Yang Yan, Jinfeng Deng, Yaoli Zhu, Yingqin Li, Huiqing Li, and Yiping Wang (Cancer Biother Radiopharm. E-pub ahead of print 23 Jul 2020; doi: 10.1089/cbr.2019.3535) at the authors' request:
“We apologized that we have found a serious problem in our paper. In fact, the Western blot experiment in our study was commissioned a third-party company for testing. In present, some peers have found that the company has forged experimental reports. After contacting the company, they were unable to provide the original images. We have checked and confirmed that the authenticity of the data provided by the company is problematic. In view of the problems in this paper, all the authors have discussed and agreed to withdraw the paper.”
The journal publisher requested the name of the “third-party company,” to which the authors replied:
“We apologize for our mistakes. Our so-called "the third party company", after further investigation, is actually not a company but an individual person. Due to the personal reasons, the previous experimental data were lost and the original raw data could not be provided. So we can not guarantee the authenticity of those data provided by that person. Some members are considering to repeat the experiment again, but we have no way to raise enough fund to repeat it. Hence after serious discussion, we decided to withdraw the manuscript.
Again we apologize sincerely for your inconvenience."