I wondered that but looking at both papers, it seems much less likely. For one thing, they looked at the same illnesses in both the original paper and the new paper, so it’s not like they did a bunch of new analysis in order to find something that’s significantly.

For another, the study doesn’t look at that many diseases, just four: cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and stroke. It’s possible the original study was doing some p-hacking in order to reach significance but these are pretty major categories of disease so they seem defensible. It would not surprise me if these are the only diseases in the original dataset.

Finally, the results are significant at the .01 level. Combined with the number of diseases, this is not anything as blatant as the classic XKCD green jellybean comic, although more subtle p-hacking could be at play.

Retracted: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/002214651456835...

Corrected: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002214651559635... (Not open access but it’s available from sci-hub.)