A journalist who has been a frequent critic of statins has been publicly accused of scientific misconduct involving image manipulation in an earlier research paper.
Maryanne Demasi is a former ABC Catalyst presenter who has a PhD in Rheumatology from the Royal Adelaide Hospital in South Australia. She has been a frequent critic of statins following her controversial Catalyst report, a proponent of low carb diets and gluten-free diets, and has added fuel to the firestorm linking mobile phones to brain cancer.
The current controversy exploded on Twitter in response to a recent paper by Demasi published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Statin wars: have we been misled about the evidence? A narrative review.”
Darrel Francis, the British cardiologist behind the ORBITA trial, led a tweetorial which refuted large portions of the paper, including the preposterous statement that statins will have total sales of $1 trillion dollars by 2020.
A reader then alerted Francis to a Retraction Watch article about a 2003 paper by Demasi in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, based on her PhD dissertation, for which an expression of concern had been issued last year. Francis then posted images from the paper showing inappropriate manipulation and duplication of images.
Dear Aseem, Fiona, John, Rita, and others I don’t know but have been sent this document too.
A mischievous person suggested I “follow the thread on Pubmed”.
You’ll be amazed at what I saw… https://t.co/rWwWRlkBsw
— Prof Darrel Francis ☺ Help Cardiology Think Again (@ProfDFrancis) February 8, 2018
Oooooh! pic.twitter.com/4PltWfPWOC