A common error, repeated in multiple papers, is that "The syndrome was first described after World War II in Americans who, held by the Japanese as prisoners of war, had become malnourished during captivity and who were then released to the care of United States personnel in the Philippines."[6] However, closer inspection of the 1951 paper by Schnitker reveals the prisoners under study were not American POWs but Japanese soldiers who, already malnourished, surrendered in the Philippines during 1945, after the war was over.