Journal retracts vitamin study...

Controversial vitamin research by Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra, published in the September 2001 issue of the journal Nutrition, was retracted in the February 2005 issue.

The research involved elderly test subjects given a vitamin and mineral supplement formulated by Chandra, a prominent researcher who was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1992.

The study purported to demonstrate striking cognitive benefits for people over 65 who took a daily vitamin and mineral supplement that Dr. Chandra formulated and has since patented.

He licensed the rights to the supplement to the Javaan Corporation, founded by his daughter, Amrita Chandra Gagnon. The company sells the supplement as Javaan 50.

Chandra claimed the supplementation produced dramatic improvement to subjects’ brain functions, including memory. He wrote the nutritional approach may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Before its 2001 publication, the article was reviewed by three scientific peers, but concerns were subsequently raised by other scientists, including editors from The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, which had turned down the article when submitted by Chandra.

In fact, British Medical Journal editor Richard Smith, in mid-2004, called for all of Chandra’s work to be investigated on the basis that Chandra’s study showed signs of being entirely fabricated.

Dr. Smith said scientists who reviewed the paper had found the methods and statistical findings so unlikely that they wondered whether the study had actually been done.

At that time, Meguid called on Newfoundland Memorial Hospital, from which Chandra retired after 27 years, to investigate Chandra’s body of work. The hospital said it was not its duty to do so. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research reportedly opened its own investigation into Chandra’s research, but Chandra has so far refused to make his data available, according to hospital officials and journal editors.

Three independent American scientists raised questions about the validity of Dr. Chandra's findings. They say that the study, published in in the journal Nutrition, has statistical irregularities and inconsistencies, and is characterized by improbable research methods.

In response to objections raised by the scientists, Nutrition's editor, Dr. Michael Meguid, published an editorial acknowledging that Dr. Chandra's paper had serious statistical flaws.

"We regret that our peer review process failed to identify these problems before publication," Dr. Meguid wrote. He was unaware when Nutrition published the study that it had already been rejected by the British Medical Journal.

No one has yet established whether Dr. Chandra did in fact do all the cognitive tests and statistical analyses that he claims in the journal article to have carried out.

When officials at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where Dr. Chandra worked for 27 years, asked to examine the study's raw data, he replied that they had mysteriously disappeared when the university moved his office.

A university spokesman, Dr. Jack Strawbridge, denied any mishandling of Dr. Chandra's papers, adding that without the raw data and with Dr. Chandra now retired and out of the country, Memorial was unable to investigate the matter.

Strawbridge told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that Chandra had avoided all attempts to turn over data that would allow other scientists to validate the study’s results by duplicating the research. He said Chandra claimed he was always traveling, too busy or misplaced the data.

He defended his research, claiming confidence in the study design, analysis and reporting, and referenced two unnamed studies in support of his research findings.

Reached by phone in Gurgaon, India, where he now lives, Dr. Chandra said, "Anyone with different views should repeat the study and see for themselves whether my findings can be confirmed or not." He added that any royalties he might receive from the supplement were to be donated to education.

The three scientists who recalculated Dr. Chandra's published results, however, said they could make no sense of them.

One of those scientists, Dr. Saul Sternberg, an experimental psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has advanced training in statistics, said that he had found "statistical anomalies and inconsistencies, measurements that were impossibly large."

Another experimental psychologist, Dr. Seth Roberts, who studies learning and memory at the University of California, Berkeley, said that he found the reported effects of the nutritional supplement unbelievable.

"The statistics were not just implausible," Dr. Roberts said, "they were impossible."

The two psychologists, along with Dr. Kenneth Carpenter, an emeritus professor of nutrition at Berkeley, said they had then found similar statistical aberrations in a previous report by Dr. Chandra, published in The Lancet in 1992 and based on the same group of elderly participants.

In the Lancet report, which has been lauded as a landmark contribution to the field of nutrition and immunity, Dr. Chandra concluded that his supplement greatly increased the participants' immune responses, halving the number of infections they suffered.

The question now is whether Dr. Chandra actually did what he reported to have done in the two studies and, if so, whether he analyzed the findings correctly. He stands by his methods, saying in the interview that "there is more than one way to do statistics."

Dr. Meguid, of Nutrition, pointed out in his editorial that flawed research could have far-reaching consequences.

"The public uncritically believes the claims emanating from such studies," he wrote, "and fellow scientists and funding agencies divert precious resources to attempt to reproduce or verify published data."

References
Chandra, R.K. (2001). Effect of vitamin and trace-element supplementation on cognitive function in elderly subjects. Nutrition, 17, 709-712
Roberts, S, & Sternberg S. (2003). Do nutritional supplements improve cognitive function in the elderly? Nutrition, 19, 976-978
Meguid, M.M. (2005). Retraction. Nutrition, 21, 286
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20050303/02
http://www.ergogenics.org/agrmulti.html