Controversy over JAMA paper that highlighted CV Risk and Testosterone Therapy

The Androgen Study Group, a group of 125 physicians and researchers, is calling for the retraction of a paper published in JAMA by Michael Ho, MD, PhD, of the Eastern Colorado VA and colleagues linking testosterone therapy with a greater risk of death, heart attack, and stroke in male veterans who had had coronary angiography. Two corrections have since been published. The first, in the Jan. 15 issue, was a clarification that the results were based on Kaplan-Meier estimates and not raw data. The second involved reclassification of patients who were excluded from the study. More than 1,000 excluded patients were assigned to different categories of exclusion, including 100 who were women. Several members of the Androgen Study Group have relationships with testosterone drugmakers, including AbbVie, Bayer, and Merck. Ho has suggested that he and his colleagues' work points the way to further large trials to investigate further the association between testosterone and heart risk.