Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1533

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Mahoney J.
Leading vitamin scientist faces fire over data
The Globe and Mail 2003 Dec 11

Full text:

A scientific firestorm has erupted over the work of Canadian researcher Ranjit Chandra, who won international acclaim for groundbreaking studies into multivitamins that he later used to promote his own nutritional supplement.

An unprecedented editorial in the journal Nutrition questions the validity of Dr. Chandra’s findings, saying he “failed to address” serious concerns and did not provide raw data so an expert could check his statistics.

“As a journal, we regret that our peer-review process failed to identify these problems before publication,” wrote Michael Meguid, Nutrition’s editor-in-chief.

In 2001, the journal published a paper by Dr. Chandra, who is an Officer of the Order of Canada, that concluded that a specific multivitamin and mineral formulation greatly enhanced the memories of seniors. Dr. Chandra holds the patent for the formula, which is marketed under the name Javaan 50.

The study is not the only one by Dr. Chandra that has been thrown into question.

In 1992, he wrote in The Lancet that the supplement led to a vast improvement in the immune system of older people.

Shortly after his 2001 paper was published, two U.S. academicians began to doubt his work because of concerns over his use of statistics.

“It struck me as pretty suspicious initially,” Seth Roberts, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview.

“The results seemed incredibly good and that wasn’t the only thing that was weird. There were all these other things and the more we looked into it, the more problems there seemed to be.”

The concerns about his Nutrition work include: differences in the makeup of the placebo and supplement groups, which should be similar if randomly selected; abnormal results in his subjects’ memory tests; and numerical and terminological inaccuracies.

Dr. Roberts and Saul Sternberg, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a letter outlining the inconsistencies, which was published in the current edition of Nutrition along with Dr. Chandra’s response.

In his letter, Dr. Chandra questions the professors’ motivations and says the journal had his papers reviewed before they were published.

“Can a nutrient supplement improve functional outcome in the elderly?

The answer based on the objective evidence so far is an unequivocal yes.

I invite Drs. Roberts and Sternberg to try such a supplement for a personal confirmation of our findings,” he wrote.

Dr. Meguid noted in his editorial, Dr. Chandra’s response did not address their specific concerns.

Debra Spadaro, Nutrition’s managing editor, acknowledged that the incident reflects badly on the peer-review process.

“Sometimes the peer reviewers, when we put the onus on them, they’re just taking the data for face value. They aren’t statisticians,” she said, adding that the issue is a subject of ongoing discussion.

Ms. Spadaro said the journal did not publish the concerns earlier because it “wanted to make sure that everything that possibly could be done was being done on behalf of the author.” She said, Dr. Meguid has a thick folder of correspondence regarding the controversy.

In June, The Lancet published a letter from Dr. Roberts, Dr. Sternberg and Kenneth Carpenter, professor emeritus of nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley, that raises similar concerns about Dr. Chandra’s 1992 paper. It also printed Dr. Chandra’s response.

Dr. Chandra did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment; an assistant to Dr. Chandra said he was travelling in a remote area of India.

.Dr. Chandra conducted his research for the 1992 and 2001 papers in St. John’s, where he was a professor of pediatric research at Memorial University’s faculty of medicine for 27 years. He retired in 2001, after his Nutrition article was published.

Sharon Peters, vice-dean of Memorial’s medical school, did not return phone messages.