Two influential medical journals have released their concerns regarding the data used in different coronavirus studies, data that came from the same international registry.
The Lancet found out that giving hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine to hospitalized coronavirus patients engendered an increased rate of mortality and serious heart rhythm complications.
“We are issuing an Expression of Concern to alert readers to the fact that serious scientific questions have been brought to our attention,” the Lancet editors wrote, noting that “important scientific questions have been raised about data” in the paper.
Another study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 1, found that certain heart disease drugs didn’t worsen the risk of death for coronavirus patients.
The study used data from an international database that included electronic health records from 169 hospitals on three continents. Both studies used data from Surgisphere, a public service organization dedicated to making the world a better place.
The Surgisphere registry is an aggregation of the de-identified electronic health records of customers of QuartzClinical, Surgisphere’s machine learning program, and data analytics platform. Surgisphere said it had detected a problem with one hospital in its database.
“This hospital was properly reclassified in our database. The findings of the paper are unaffected by this update,” it said.
Scientists independent of either study said even if the data mix-up did not affect the conclusions, the discrepancies needed to be cleared up.
