Vol. 109, July 2010
Huang Y, Brown AR, Cross SJ, Cruz J, Rice A, Jaiswal S, Fregosi RF. Influence of prenatal nicotine exposure on development of the ventilatory response to hypoxia and hypercapnia in neonatal rats. J Appl Physiol 109: 149–158, 2010. First published April 29, 2010; doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.01036.2009.—One of the findings in our study was a slight but significant increase in the ventilatory response to a 3-min period of hyperoxia in animals studied on postnatal day 1. When discussing this observation, we stated that a previous study in 1-day-old human infants (1) also showed a slight increase in ventilation in response to hyperoxia. Thus figure 5 in the paper by Sovik et al. (1) shows an approximately 20% increase in ventilation in the first 2–3 s of hyperoxia, an 8–10% increase 3–8 s into the hyperoxic challenge, and a 10% dip in ventilation at the 15 s point of hyperoxia. However, the authors of that study have contacted us and indicated that the data were noisy and that, in their opinion, the changes in ventilation were not significant. Two unfortunate aspects of this situation are that neither statistical analysis nor standard error bars were provided for those data, and we failed to realize that the data had not been subjected to statistical analysis; we simply “called the data as we saw it.” Nonetheless, the authors have expressed confidence that the 1-day-old infants that they studied have no ventilatory response to 15 s of hyperoxia. Given this additional information from Sovik et al., we wish to retract the statement that the 1-day-old human infants in their study increased the ventilatory response to hyperoxia.