Kerfuffle Over Antishock Drug Paper

Copenhagen University Hospital researcher Anders Perner was one decimal point away from getting sued for millions of dollars. In June, his paper comparing two treatments used in patients who had lost large amounts of blood, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Perner and colleagues found that hydroxyethyl starch (HES), a widely used synthetic version of regular starch, carried more risks and was less effective than Ringer's acetate, a mildy hypotonic solution used to replace lost blood. But Perner and his team rounded to the nearest tenth when identifying the type of HES used in their study: they stated in the title and methods section that they used HES 130/0.4, when in fact it was HES 130/0.42. The first number (130) describes the molecular weight of the compound, and the second gives the number of hydroxyethyl groups in the starch. That would seem like a small and inconsequential ...