Tagged: Steven Engebretson
Submit What is Hot and Get it Accepted
Update September 15, 2013 below
The most frequently visited science integrity watchdogs and post publication discussion sites (Retractionwatch, Science Integrity Digest, PubPeer etc.) have so far missed an honest confession of a young climate scientist who was lucky enough to publish in Nature and writes, in an article published in The Free Press,
I Left Out the Full Truth to get My Climate Change Paper Published.
Patrick T. Brown, who has apparently left his institution in the meantime and even Academia at large over much frustation (which he explains in his The Free Press article) claims that, only because he stuck to a common narrative (about wildfires and climate change), he got his paper published. The Nature article is behind a paywall, so I can’t check it. From its Abstract,
So far, anthropogenic warming has enhanced the aggregate expected frequency of extreme daily wildfire growth by 25% (5–95 range of 14–36%), on average, relative to preindustrial conditions. But for some fires, there was approximately no change, and for other fires, the enhancement has been as much as 461%. When historical fires are subjected to a range of projected end-of-century conditions, the aggregate expected frequency of extreme daily wildfire growth events increases by 59% (5–95 range of 47–71%) under a low SSP1–2.6 emissions scenario compared with an increase of 172% (5–95 range of 156–188%) under a very high SSP5–8.5 emissions scenario, relative to preindustrial conditions.
Brown, P.T., Hanley, H., Mahesh, A. et al. Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06444-3
In his The Free Press article, Brown explains,
Continue readingMy Periodontal Medicine Evening Seminar in Berlin
Early in 2016, I had been invited by the Berlin Society of Periodontology for giving an evening seminar at the University Dental School of Charité. As I had dedicated considerable time and effort for unveiling details and peculiarities of the so-called Engebretson scandal which had concomitantly been published on this blog, I found the invitation an excellent opportunity to share my views on the scandal with a distinguished auditorium of Berlin periodontists who, after all, had been trained and educated by late Professor Jean-Pierre Bernimoulin. Bernimoulin had passed in September 2015 and I confirmed in the introduction of my seminar that he had actually been the only periodontist in Germany (he was originally from Belgium) of international stature in his time.
Continue readingSome Remarks on “100 Years of Progress in Periodontal Medicine” (II) – Diabetes Mellitus
ISTOCK/MTHIPSORN under fair use.
That periodontitis and diabetes mellitus are related is known for more than 100 years. While Beck et al. (2019), in their contribution to the JDR Centennial Series on 100 Years of Progress in Periodontal Medicine, start out with a paper by Williams and Mahan (1960), which is mentioned as the first landmark paper (allegedly the first study showing that periodontal therapy reduces insulin requirement; but this study had only shown that removing all teeth with advanced decay improved glycemic control), the latter authors quote a booklet by Otto Georg Grunert of 1899 a patient guidebook for diabetics: Ueber Krankheitserscheinungen in der Mundhöhle beim Diabetes: Therapeutische Winke für Diabetiker. In particular the medical profession had known about the link of diabetes mellitus and oral disease for long.
Further landmark, or “milestone”, papers in Beck et al.’s list on the diabetes-periodontitis relationship appeared around 1996, when late Professor Robert J. Genco, for the first time, had used a slide with the message, Floss or Die! on the occasion of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Periodontology in New Orleans. Some of these studies indeed sparked the idea that it would be possible to reduce HbA1c, the marker of diabetic control, by proper periodontal treatment of diabetic patients.
New Updates On the Perio-Diabetes Link
Earlier this year, delegates of the European Federation of Periodontology (EFP) and the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) had met in Madrid for a joint workshop on an update of the Perio-Diabetes link. I had reported on the event and some key findings, quickly posted on the EFP web page, here.
Already on and after 24 August 2017, a Consensus Report by the two organizations was prematurely published, and quickly (temporarily) withdrawn, in the EFP’s Journal of Clinical Periodontology and the IDF’s Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice. I had managed to get a print-out of the not-yet edited (and later withdrawn) draft version published on the JCP Accepted Articles page and had noticed that most of the evidence presented was derived of yet-to-be published review articles based on the workshop proceedings.
The final version of the Consensus Report (Sanz et al. 2017, Early View Articles), including guidelines for patients and health professionals dealing with patients suffering from diabetes and periodontal disease, went online this week, but still references to review papers presented on the occasion of the workshop have a 2017 assignment and are not paginated which may make it more difficult for scientists and clinicians outside periodontology or dentistry to locate the final papers.
To be clear, when it comes to keeping our medical collegues, and in particular diabetologists, interested in the very long-known link between periodontitis and metabolic diseases, proving beneficial effects of periodontal treatment on diabetic control is crucial. All was fine as long as numerous published, small-scale, mostly single-center, and often poorly executed, trials apparently showed that thorough subgingival scaling in patients with both periodontitis and diabetes led to an about 0.4% reduction of glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), at least after three or four months. As that would in effect spare an additional antidiabetic drug, diabetologists stayed interested. Although results in a few trials indicated that the effect was not long-lasting, i.e., no longer discernable after, say, six months.
Scrutinizing the Perio-Systemic Link?
After rather devastating negative conclusions made in a systematic review (SR) of the literature regarding the long claimed, possibly causal, relationship between periodontitis and atherosclerotic vascular disease by Lockhart et al. (2012), a highly alerted group of members of our specialty organizations, the Amercian Academy of Periodontology and the European Federation of Periodontology, had hastily organized a joint workshop, in the end of 2012, to fix unwelcome results of a number of large intervention studies by creating new systematic reviews on the Perio-Systemic link. The clear aim was to cement, once and forever, the claim of the number one clinical problem: periodontal disease and general health are closely related.
While the proceedings had been published, open access, in special issues of our main professional journals, the Journal of Clinical Periodontology and the Journal of Periodontology, workshop participants of the EFP presumptuously condensed the 209 pages of the 16, mostly valuable, papers in a nutshell, strangely called Manifesto.
Periodontology 