Harvard: Sleep Apnoea and Faking

It was Charles Dickens who accurately described the clinical picture of adult obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome in The Pickwick Papers. He would be turning in his grave if he knew what is happening today.

Office of Research Integrity (ORI)
April 6,2009

Robert B. Fogel, M.D., formerly of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, was found by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) to have engaged in scientific misconduct by falsifying and fabricating baseline data from a study of sleep apnea in severely obese patients.

Specifically, PHS found that for the data reported in the Sleep paper, the Respondent:

• Changed/falsified roughly half of the physiologic data
• Fabricated roughly 20% of the anatomic data that were supposedly obtained from Computed Tomography (CT) images
• Changed/falsified 50 to 80 percent of the other anatomic data
• Changed/falsified roughly 40 to 50 percent of the sleep data so that those data would better conform to his hypothesis.
• Respondent also published some of the falsified and fabricated data in an abstract in Sleep 24, Abstract Supplement A7, 2001.

Sleep, the scientific journal had to retract the paper.
Fogel was the former co-director of the Fellowship in Sleep Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a former associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Fogel now works at Merck Research Laboratories, where he is director of clinical research at its respiratory and allergy division.

Federal investigators had earlier subpoenaed financial records related to Scott S. Reuben, a Massachusetts doctor accused of faking data used in at least 21 anesthesiology studies.

Harvard related posts:
Bipolar Disorder in Children
Bipolar and ADHD: Boys and Breasts
Statins-Harvard-Roosevelt
Bipolar Disorder: Biederman Einstein God.
Faking related posts:
Coffee in Panama – Faking Is Not All Bad
Organic?
PTSD: Diagnosis du Jour
Anhinga in Costa Rica - Faking Is Not All Bad
Hemlock: Biology, Shakespeare, Socrates, House, M.D.