For more than a decade cardiac stem cell therapy has attracted an enormous amount of attention, promise, and research dollars. Now an original and important new study published in BMJ finds that many of the most promising results in the field are illusory and that the potential benefits of stem cells to treat heart disease are probably far more modest than we’ve been led to believe. The study also raises disturbing questions about ethics and research conduct (and misconduct) in a high-flying field.
Researchers in the UK, led by Darrel Francis, closely scrutinized 133 reports from 49 different clinical trials testing autologous bone marrow stem cells in patients with heart disease. They found an astonishingly large number of discrepancies in the reports– altogether more than 600 discrepancies, ranging from minor oversights to serious unexplained errors and apparent deceptions. Many errors were mathematical or statistical errors while others were more general, such as conflicting descriptions of studies as either a prospective randomized trial or a retrospective observational study.
The key finding of the study is that there was a very strong correlation between the number of discrepancies in a study and the reported improvement in heart function as measured by left ventricular ejection fraction(LVEF)…
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Hi! Great article! Thanks for putting up this post. It’s sad how hard earned money are wasted in funding stuff like that, and how people’s hope are raised when they report that there can be more options in finding treatment. I have some questions though… does this particular study is isolated in one country or is the whole field? Is there some truth that what they said in the past could be true? Anyhow, thanks again. Hope to hear from you