Revue médicale de Bruxelles
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Since a few years, the number of cases of fraud reported in the scientific and medical literature and retraction of articles has increased exponentially. Such fraud is due to fabrication, falsification, theft, embellishment or retention of data, plagiarism, incorrect list of authors or undisclosed conflicts of interest. ⋯ This crisis can be controlled by measures at different levels: society, universities, scientific institutions, study promoters, scientific and medical journals. A legal framework at EU level would allow to combat such fraud more efficiently.
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Munchausen's syndrome is classified as a chronic factitious disorder with predominant physical signs and symptoms. Several symptoms are specific to this disorder, such as travelling and pseudologia fantastica. ⋯ We discuss also the opportunity to classify such a syndrome as a factitious disorder. Indeed, several authors suggest classifying Munchausen syndrome as a subtype of somatoform disorders, as those two disorders share a lot of characteristics.