An ob-gyn journal has retracted a clinically influential 2016 paper on the use of steroids in women undergoing cesarean delivery, citing questions about the data.
The article, "Antenatal corticosteroid administration before elective caesarean section at term to prevent neonatal respiratory morbidity: a randomized controlled trial," appeared in the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology (EJOG), and was written by a group at Cairo University in Egypt led by Adel Nada.
The study purported to involve nearly 1,300 women – making it the largest analysis of women receiving steroids for the indication in the trial. But Ben Mol, an ob-gyn researcher and data sleuth at Monash Medical Centre in Australia, noted that the paper – which has been cited 32 times, per Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science – was based on a thesis by the second author, M.M. Shafeek. Something in the two articles caught Mol's eye, he told Retraction Watch:
the start and end dates in the thesis deviate from the paper. Also, the female – male baby rate in more than 1200 babies was 59 to 41, which is impossible.
Mol and his colleagues questioned the data – and those from two other currently unretracted papers – in an article they submitted to the
