NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The Journal of the American College of Cardiology and a 15-member team of researchers have acknowledged that they were wrong to claim in a June report that only 22% of primary care doctors and 42% of heart doctors feel well prepared to assess a woman’s heart disease risk.
In fact, the same report, published online June 22, included survey data showing that 64% of primary care doctors and 82% of cardiologists felt “very well prepared” or “extremely well prepared” to assess a female patient’s risks.
With a list of corrections released this week, the Journal and the research team, led by Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, have also distanced themselves from their original conclusion that “heart disease is not a top priority for physicians.”
The study, titled “Knowledge, Attitudes, and Beliefs Regarding Cardiovascular Disease in Women,” purported to show that doctors are not sufficiently concerned about heart disease in females even though it is far and away the number-one killer of women. The authors reported in June that heart disease in women was a top concern for only 39% of primary care doctors.
But that conclusion was based on a survey question that did not actually ask doctors to rank their concerns in order.
In fact, 76% of doctors gave heart disease a concern score of 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being “extremely concerned.”
The authors continue to assert, however, that awareness of cardiovascular disease among physicians “remains largely inadequate.”
A journal spokeswoman said Thursday in an email that the article had undergone peer review twice, before the original manuscript was published and before the revised version was published.
Reuters Health alerted the authors and the journal’s editors to “serious discrepancies and shortcomings” in the paper and editorial before their online publication in June and, as a result, declined to report on the study’s findings.
The journal went ahead with publication, and stories based on the original paper were published by multiple media outlets.
The corrections and apologies were issued 53 days later, on August 14.
“The authors of this paper acknowledge that the findings from the survey reported in this article were not fairly reflected in the presentation of the results or in the discussion of their implication,” the correction statement for the article reads. “The editors would like to apologize for these potentially misleading conclusions, as they may have inaccurately represented the survey data.”
The journal said “the online version of the article has been corrected”; however, the illustration accompanying the paper continued to incorrectly report the ratio of doctors who said they felt well prepared to deal with heart disease in women.
In response to reporters’ inquiries, Dr. Valentin Fuster, the journal’s editor in chief, issued a statement saying the editors “were concerned that the commentary describing the survey data exaggerated the findings – not that the survey findings themselves (found in the tables) were incorrect. This constitutes grounds for and led to the correction.”
The study was done under the auspices of the Women’s Heart Alliance.
SOURCES: http://bit.ly/2sPgv9a and http://bit.ly/2x5hMXr
J Am Coll Cardiol 2017.
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