The journal’s editors recognized the problem before publication, but the authors failed to address it.
Eight months after the Journal of the American Heart Association published a study implying that e-cigarettes magically cause heart attacks before people even try them, it has retracted the article. “The editors are concerned that the study conclusion is unreliable,” JAHA says in a notice posted today.
Based on data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH), Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz claimed to find that “e-cigarette use is an independent risk factor for having had a myocardial infarction.” Glantz, a longtime anti-smoking activist and e-cigarette opponent who directs the Center for Tobacco Research Control and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, said the results provided “more evidence that e-cigs cause heart attacks.” Notwithstanding the evidence that vaping is much less hazardous than smoking, Glantz and Bhatta, an epidemiologist at the center, concluded that “e‐cigarettes should not be promoted or prescribed as a less risky alternative to combustible cigarettes and should not be recommended for smoking cessation among people with or at risk of myocardial infarction.”
But as University of Louisville tobacco researcher Brad Rodu pointed out last July, the analysis that Bhatta and Glantz ran included former smokers who had heart attacks before they started vaping.
Jacob Sullum – Reason.com – Feb 18, 2020.
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