Sir

Your News story “German garlic study under scrutiny”1 reports allegations of data manipulation and incorrect data analysis raised in a German newspaper about a study we carried out using a garlic preparation called Kwai. They were made after the results of our clinical study “Randomized placebo-controlled double-blind study on antiatherosclerotic effect of Kwai in common carotid arteries and femoral arteries” were published2.

As mentioned in your story, an official committee at Humboldt University was set up to investigate the claims of falsification. It has now announced that the accusation of data manipulation is unfounded.

The investigating committee has found that the clinical trial had been sanctioned in advance by the relevant ethics committee and that the patients had agreed individually, in writing, to participate. The use of an alternative statistical evaluation was explained in detail in our original article2, but we have clarified this matter in a letter to the same journal3.

We have also confirmed the plaque reduction reported in our published article2 by two more ultrasound photos of the same patient from the verum group (with initials and date at the same examination time) using the sector scanner, a different ultrasound system (data not shown). We have examined and confirmed the reproducibility of our earlier ultrasound photos, and we will present our confirmatory findings in a future article.