Childhood Obesity is officially retracting the article entitled, “A School-Based, Peer-Led, Social Marketing Intervention to Engage Spanish Adolescents in a Healthy Lifestyle (‘‘We Are Cool’’—Som la Pera Study): A Parallel Cluster Randomized Controlled Study,” by Aceves-Martins M, Llauradó E, Tarro L, et al. [Child Obes 2017;13:300–313; doi: 10.1089/chi.2016.0216], due to discovered inaccuracies in the p values, which lead to the determination that the results were irreproducible.
Almost three years after the publication of the original article by Aceves-Martins M, et al. the Editor of Childhood Obesity received and published a Commentary from Golzarri-Aorryo et al.,1 (Indiana University, Bloomington, IN; USA) along with a response2 from the authors of the original paper.
The commentary by Golzarri-Aorryo et al., raised concerns about an “unexplained deviation from the prespecified analytic plan,” and went on to say that “the authors do not specify whether (and, if so, how) clustering and nesting were taken into account in any of these analyses.”
Aceves-Martins et al., responded, in part, saying “…other alternative approaches might have been used, like multilevel analysis…but since the [intracluster correlation coefficient] was negligible, and given the scope of this study, such approaches were not considered.”
Voluminous correspondence took place between both parties through the Editor of Childhood Obesity which ultimately led to Aceves-Martins et al., to conclude, “We are concerned that the outcome for change from baseline to end could be coded incorrectly for how it is interpreted. And we are therefore unable to perform the appropriate re-analysis on the data adjusted for cluster when we cannot first match the sample sizes (n)…”
At the conclusion of this protracted process, the Aceves-Martins, et al., team agreed with the Editor of Childhood Obesity that the article should be officially retracted. It is important to note that the Editor of Childhood Obesity has invited the Aceves-Martin team to submit their updated work on this study to be submitted to the journal as a new manuscript for peer review.
The two published commentaries will remain in the literature but will contain links to the official retraction notice.
Childhood Obesity is committed to upholding the scientific record and the community it serves.
Retraction Date: September 15, 2020
References
- 1. Golzarri-Arroyo L, Oakes JM, Brown AW, Allison DB. Incorrect analyses of cluster-randomized trials that do not take clustering and nesting into account likely lead to p-values that are too small. Child Obes 2020;16:65–66 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 2. Aceves-Martins M, Llauradó E, Tarro L, et al. Response to: Comment about statistical analysis of a cluster-randomized trial about clustering and nesting. Child Obes 2020;16:67–69 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]