Last April PSA Rising ran a brief report of a Norwegian study that claimed that “Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) prevent some cancers but . . . the advantage from NSAID protection against oral cancer was wiped out by double the rate of heart attack or stroke.”

This weekend it was evident that this study of the effects of ibuprofen and naproxen on oral cancer was fabricated from A to Z.

Norwegian hospital officials stated last week that the study was faked. Today, according to Reuters, the hospital in Oslo said: “A Norwegian cancer expert made up fictitious patients for an article about treatment of oral cancer published in a leading medical journal. . . .”

“The material was fabricated,” said Trine Lind, spokeswoman of the Norwegian Radium Hospital where Jon Sudbo has worked as a doctor and a researcher. “We are shocked. This is the worst thing that could happen in a research institution like ours.”

The hospital spokeswoman said Sudbo, 44, “invented patients and case histories for a study of oral cancer that was published in the British medical journal the Lancet in October 2005.”

The Lancet is Britain’s leading medical journal.

ANNE MARTE BLINDHEIM in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet reported Friday Frykter norsk lege har jukset før that “250 of his sample of 908 people in the study all shared the same birthday,” Reuters said.

Stein Vaaler [photographed below], strategy director for the Oslo cancer center, said: “A colleague raised questions about the article when it was published,” and (according to reports by Canadian CTV and Associated Press ( Cancer researcher admits to fabricating data) “when the researcher was confronted this week about the data, he acknowledged the fabrication, Vaaler said.”

Norwegian media are calling the situation “a personal tragedy.”

“All of it was fabricated,” Vaaler said. “It was not manipulation of real data — it was just complete fabrication.”

“This is a very serious situation for the hospital,” the center’s director, Aage Danielsson, said in a letter to colleagues that was posted on the Web site of The Norwegian broadcaster TV2. The hospital is making up its mind whether to fire the researcher.

Sudbo’s article, Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and the risk of oral cancer: a nested case-control study, starts out from a widely accepted, uncontroversial premise: “Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) seem to prevent several types of cancer, but could increase the risk of cardiovascular complications.”

Sudbo pretended to have investigated this in thousands of heavy smokers:

METHODS: We undertook a nested case-control study to analyse data from a population-based database (Cohort of Norway; CONOR), which consisted of prospectively obtained health data from all regions of Norway. People with oral cancer were identified from the 9241 individuals in CONOR who were at increased risk of oral cancer because of heavy smoking (15 pack-years), and matched controls were selected from the remaining heavy smokers (who did not have cancer).

He then pretends to have carefully analyzed probabilities and odds ratios, making up ages, drugs used, cancer stages and all the rest:

FINDINGS: We identified and analysed 454 (5%) people with oral cancer (279 men, 175 women, mean [SD] age at diagnosis 63.3 [13.2] years) and 454 matched controls (n=908); 263 (29%) had used NSAIDs, 83 (9%) had used paracetamol (for a minimum of 6 months), and 562 (62%) had used neither drug. NSAID use (but not paracetamol use) was associated with a reduced risk of oral cancer (including in active smokers; hazard ratio 0.47, 95% CI 0.37-0.60, p<0.0001). Smoking cessation also lowered the risk of oral cancer (0.41, 0.32-0.52, p<0.0001). Additionally, long-term use of NSAIDs (but not paracetamol) was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular-disease-related death (2.06, 1.34-3.18, p=0.001). NSAID use did not significantly reduce overall mortality (p=0.17).

He offers a solemn, platitudinous interpretation of this phony-baloney:

INTERPRETATION: Long-term use of NSAIDs is associated with a reduced incidence of oral cancer (including in active smokers), but also with an increased risk of death due to cardiovascular disease. These findings highlight the need for a careful risk-benefit analysis when the long-term use of NSAIDs is considered.

With the admission that this study is fake, questions must arise about Sudbo’s earlier studies on oral cancer and on prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, cervical cancer and breast cancer. Last year he published an article Biology and treatment options during the development of prostate cancer. He and 2 colleagues said:

Compelling evidence indicates that environmental and life-style factors, in addition to well-known risk factors such as testosterone level and age, are important for the development of prostate cancer.

After summarizing current knowledge how prostate cancer starts, they went on to draw on “our own clinical research experience in this field” as well as a literature search. Now the question is, was that research real or fake?

Jon Sudbo, whose name PubMed records listed on 38 medical articles, has published about cancer in the leading US medical journal, New England Journal of Medicine.

From Dagbladet it appears that the National Cancer Institute sent 70 million kroner to the Radium Hospital in 2004 for cancer research.