Last summer media outlets across the world, including Scope, reported on a study that identified the genetic signatures that appear linked with living a long life; in an interesting twist, the researchers today retracted the controversial paper. Spoonful of Medicine has the story:
Shortly after being published in Science, the study’s methods drew fire from genomicists and biostatisticians, which prompted the journal’s editors to issue an expression of concern in November. Critics argued that the sample size, at 1,055 centenarians and 1,267 controls, was not large enough to draw robust conclusions, Nature reported at the time. In addition, the researchers analyzed the two experimental groups using slightly different SNP chips and in different labs, which could bias the data, Newsweek quoted Duke genomicist David Goldstein as saying.
The authors responded that they would reanalyze the data immediately in response to the criticisms, many of which were communicated over social media...
In today’s retraction notice, the authors wrote that the analysis still found disease-related genetic factors associated with long life that clustered into subgroups — but they differed enough “from those originally published online to the point of becoming a new report.”
Previously: Researchers identify “genetic signatures” of longevity
