Breastfeeding Medicine officially retracts the published article entitled, “Can Traditional Fermented Food Products Protect Mothers Against Lactational Mastitis,” by Pelin Basım and Yasxar Özdenkaya (Breastfeed Med 2020;15(3):163–169 (doi: 10.1089/bfm.2019.0261).
After publication of the article, the Editor of the Journal received correspondence from a reader questioning the statistics as many of the odds ratios appeared to lie outside of the quoted confidence intervals. In addition to a review of the article, the Editor referred the paper to a statistician for re-review. Both the Editorial review and the statistician agreed that that the presentation of the data of odds ratios and confidence intervals were not only incorrect but reflected a lack of understanding of basic statistical methods. Thus, it was determined that the conclusions of the manuscript were not substantiated.
The Editor and Publisher of Breastfeeding Medicine is committed to upholding the validity and integrity of the scientific literature and therefore have decided to retract the paper and sincerely apologizes to the readership for missing this issue during the initial review process.