A group of eye researchers is up to eight retractions for problems with the ethics approval for their studies.
Prior to the nineties (and we’re being generous here), health researchers might be forgiven for forgetting research ethics review. Saying nothing about research ethics being an integral part of their research design. But those days are long past. Without ethics approval, we can only speculate about matters such as consent for the research (discrete from consent for the clinical procedure) and beneficence considerations.
The senior author on all eight publications was Jorge G. Arroyo, a former faculty member at Harvard. Arroyo’s LinkedIn page now lists him as being with Boston Vision, a private medical practice.
Here’s the notice for the six retractions in IOVS, which covers abstracts submitted to the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology between 2019 and 2021:
“Effect of 3-Hour Normobaric Hyperoxia on Diabetic Macular Edema” by Robert Minturn, Brendan Seto, Keiko Yamada, Ke Zeng, and Jorge G. Arroyo (Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2019;60(9):2635).
“The Effect of Hyperoxia and Hypercapnia on Retinal Vascular Blood Flow in Healthy Adults” by Keiko Yamada, Brendan Seto, Christopher Llerena, Christopher Hsu, Chie Sotozono, Takatoshi Maeno, and Jorge G. Arroyo (Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2019;60(9):5742).
