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Retraction

Retraction: Downgrading MELD Improves the Outcomes after Liver Transplantation in Patients with Acute-on-Chronic Hepatitis B Liver Failure

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Concerns have been raised that the transplants performed in the local context at the time of the procedures reported in this article [1] may have involved organs/tissues procured from prisoners [2].

Details as to the donor sources and methods of obtaining informed consent from donors were not reported in [1], and when following up on these concerns the authors did not clarify these issues or the cause(s) of donor death in response to journal inquiries. International ethical standards call for transparency in organ donor and transplantation programs and clear informed consent procedures including considerations to ensure that donors are not subject to coercion [3, 4, 5].

The authors stated that no vulnerable populations were involved in their research and all organs were obtained voluntarily but did not provide ethics approval documentation or consent forms to support their claim or clarify whether organs had been procured from prisoners.

The authors did not respond to inquiries about the availability of underlying data supporting this study.

Owing to the lack of documentation to demonstrate that this study had prospective ethical approval, insufficient reporting, unresolved concerns around the source of transplanted organs and whether they included organs from prisoners, and in compliance with international ethical standards for organ/tissue donation and transplantation, the PLOS ONE Editors retract this article.

One of the corresponding authors, Shusen Zheng, notified the journal that all authors disagree with the retraction. The other authors either could not be reached or did not respond directly.

References

  1. 1. Ling Q, Xu X, Wei Q, Liu X, Guo H, Zhuang L, et al. (2012) Downgrading MELD Improves the Outcomes after Liver Transplantation in Patients with Acute-on-Chronic Hepatitis B Liver Failure. PLoS ONE 7(1): e30322. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030322 pmid:22291934
  2. 2. Rogers W, Robertson MP, Ballantyne A, et al Compliance with ethical standards in the reporting of donor sources and ethics review in peer-reviewed publications involving organ transplantation in China: a scoping review BMJ Open 2019;9:e024473. pmid:30723071
  3. 3. World Health Organization. WHO guiding principles on human cell, tissue and organ transplantation. Transplantation 2010;90:229–33. pmid:20664493
  4. 4. WMA—The World Medical Association. WMA Statement on organ and tissue donation. https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-statement-on-organ-and-tissue-donation/
  5. 5. Stock P. Policy and Ethics. The Transplantation Society. https://www.tts.org/about-tts-5/governance/policy-a-ethics

    Citation: The PLOS ONE Editors (2019) Retraction: Downgrading MELD Improves the Outcomes after Liver Transplantation in Patients with Acute-on-Chronic Hepatitis B Liver Failure. PLoS ONE 14(7): e0220487. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220487

    Published: July 25, 2019

    Copyright: © 2019 The PLOS ONE Editors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.