Abstract
Dr. William Armstead, the corresponding author of the article entitled, “Sex and Age Differences in Epinephrine Mechanisms and Outcomes after Brain Injury” (by William M. Armstead, John Riley, and Monica S. Vavilala; J Neurotrauma 2017;34(8):1666–1675; DOI: 10.1089/neu.2016.4770) has requested, via email, a full retraction of the published paper since “substantive questions have arisen regarding the findings, presentation and conclusions reported in the paper that could not be answered with available source data.”
On three separate occasions, both the publisher and editor requested additional information detailing the specifics of the questions which were raised that invalidated the findings in the study, but did not receive a response from Dr. Armstead. Despite being unable to ascertain more unambiguous information, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neurotrauma agreed to Dr. Armstead's request for a retraction after receiving agreements from the article's coauthors.
Notably, Dr. Armstead also requested the retraction of two additional articles published in Journal of Neurotrauma, 1,2 making the same claim for all three papers. The two other articles are retracted separately. 3,4
The editor and publisher of Journal of Neurotrauma is committed to preserving the accuracy of scientific literature.