Society error leads to published — then retracted — Alzheimer's abstract from top group

Alzheimer’s & Dementia has retracted a meeting abstract the journal published without the OK of the researchers, a top group from Harvard, who submitted it but withdrew the work before the conference.

That, as they say, might require some unpacking. Maybe this will make things clearer.

Raj Hooli, a graduate student in the lab of Rudolph Tanzi, a leading neuroscientist at Harvard — where he holds the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy endowed chair of neurology — had submitted the abstract, “Genome-wide assessment of copy number variations in early-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” for consideration at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease (ICAD).

As Tanzi explains:

Later, due to a visa issue could not attend. I was also unavailable. So, he recalled the abstract within days of submitting it. As such, it should never have appeared in the ICAD meeting book. It was ICAD’s mistake and they have apologized.

That’s more or less what the notice says:

This article has been retracted at the request of the author and the journal’s society. The author had not intended for this abstract to be published but it was erroneously included by the society due to a misunderstanding. The author did not respond to an invitation to have the abstract included in this issue and had assumed that as a result the abstract would have been removed from the program.

And the ending might be happy. According to Tanzi:

 The study described in the abstract is being prepared for submission to Nature Genetics.

Alzheimer’s & Dementia seems to be prone to this sort of mishap lately. Last month, we wrote about how the journal had withdrawn a publication — linking dental x-rays with Alzheimer’s — because of a “misclassification” error at the editorial office.