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Top journals raise concerns about data in two studies related to Covid-19 - STAT
Jun 02, 2020 2 mins, 34 secs

Two of the world’s leading medical journals on Tuesday expressed concern about potential flaws in the data produced by a small company to draw major conclusions about Covid-19 — that certain heart drugs are safe, and that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine is not.

“Serious questions have been raised about the reliability of the findings reported in this paper,” Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet, where the hydroxychloroquine study was published, wrote on Twitter.

Eric Rubin, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, which published the study of heart drug safety, struck a similar tone.

Both studies in question used data from Surgisphere, a little-known company based in Chicago that claimed in the Lancet study to have data from 671 hospitals on six continents.

After suspending the clinical trial arm focused on hydroxychloroquine, the WHO said it would review the data generated so far.

But news reports and experts have raised questions about the integrity of the Surgisphere data.

The Guardian, for example, reported on discrepancies in data said to come from Australia in the Lancet study.

One issue, according to the letter: In some countries, “a relatively small number of hospitals are reported to have provided electronic patient record data to Surgisphere, yet these reports describe a remarkably high proportion of all PCR-confirmed cases in the respective countries.” They flagged specific concerns with data purported to come from the United Kingdom and Turkey.

In a statement, the lead author of the two studies, cardiologist Mandeep Mehra of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that the research team “initiated independent reviews of the data used in both papers after learning of the concerns that have been raised about the reliability of the database.” Mehra said the decision for the outside reviews came the remaining co-authors of the papers, “independent of Surgisphere.”.

The Lancet and New England Journal on Tuesday separately issued their expressions of concerns.

In their notice, the Lancet’s editors said the independent audit of the data was “expected very shortly” and noted the “serious scientific questions” that had been raised.

In a statement on its website after criticisms were raised about the Lancet study, it highlighted “the validity of our database.” It said its registry was based on electronic health records from customers of its machine learning program and data analytics platform, which allow the company to in turn use data from the records to study “real-world, real-time patient encounters.”.

But there have been concerns raised about the potential side effects of the drugs in people with Covid-19; the Food and Drug Administration, for example, has said it should not be used outside of clinical trials or for patients who are not hospitalized, because of the risk it poses to heart health?

Trump’s critics used the Lancet study to argue that by promoting the drug, the president had been endangering the public.

The way the USA studies used the drug is incorrect, they gave it to the very sicked VA patients, about 60% African American, who had many heart problems!

its not a good drug for anyone with heart problems.

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