Ron Waksman Paper on Novel CAD Test Retracted

Trouble continues to mount for the noninvasive CAD test from Spirocor. Last week, in a guest post on CardioBrief, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus reported the retraction of a paper with authors from Israel (where Spirocor is located) in the the American Journal of the Medical Sciences. Oransky and Marcus also noted that prominent US cardiologist Ron Waksman was the author of a second paper on the Spirocor test. In fact, Waksman was the editor-in-chief of the journal, Cardiovascular and Revascularization Medicine and also served as a consultant to Spirocor and as a co-principal investigator along with William Weintraub of the SPIROCOR Coronary Outcome by Respiratory Stress Examination (SCORE) trial, which according to ClinicalTrials.Gov has been terminated.

Now Oransky and Marcus report on Retraction Watch that Waksman’s paper in his own journal has also been withdrawn. Here is the current citation for the paper:

RETRACTED: An innovative noninvasive respiratory stress test indicates significant coronary artery disease

Ron Waksman, Steven Sushinsky, Petros Okubagzi, Patricia Landry, Rebecca Torguson, Anh Bui, Arthur Shiyovich, Steven M. Scharf, Amos Katz

Cardiovascular revascularization medicine : including molecular interventions 1 January 2010 (volume 11 issue 1 Pages 20-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.carrev.2009.09.005)

And here is the text of the retraction on the journal’s website:

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Authors.

The article contains inaccurate data. It was found that patient data files were matched incorrectly in 33 cases to the corresponding Quantitative Coronary Angiography results; therefore the published data is inaccurate. As such, the manuscript should not be available for citation and apologies are offered to readers of the journal.

Oransky and Marcus also note that although Waksman disclosed his relationship to Spirocor in an abstract published in Circulation, he did not include this disclosure in the now-retracted paper. In addition, the new retraction does not include any mention of Spirocor.