Update (October 16): Nielsen and Wei’s study was retracted by Nature Medicine on October 8.
Astudy published in Nature Medicine that found an increased mortality rate in people with an HIV-preventing gene variant has a major flaw, according to the lead author, Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley. In a series of tweets, Nielsen says that he was notified of “an error in the UK Biobank data that likely explains most or all of our results regarding CCR5 delta-32.”
People with two copies of the Δ32 variant of the gene CCR5 have protection from HIV infection because it prevents the virus from entering immune cells.
Nielsen and his colleague Xinzhu Wei’s study, published in June, had found a 21 percent increase in mortality in people with two copies of the Δ32 allele. But the results were criticized by Sean Harrison at the University of Bristol who tried and ...
