VOX – You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.
Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s.
One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.
The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake.
A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.”
“While that exact number is hotly contested, a 27 percent increase in mortality for a common procedure for years on end can add up to an extraordinary death toll.”
Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.
After the revelations, a new meta-analysis was published in 2014, evaluating whether to use beta blockers before non-cardiac surgery. It found that a course of beta blockers made it 27 percent more likely that someone would die within 30 days of their surgery.
That is, the policy which Poldermans had recommended using falsified data, adopted in Europe on the basis of his research, was actually dramatically increasing the odds people would die in surgery.
Millions of surgeries were conducted across the US and Europe during the years from 2009 to 2013 when those misguided guidelines were in place.
One provocative analysis from cardiologists Graham Cole and Darrel Francis estimated that there were 800,000 deaths compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner …
