Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15580

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Rubenstein S.
Academic Medical Centers Often Guilty of Research Hype
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2009 May 4
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/05/04/academic-medical-centers-often-guilty-of-research-hype/

Full text:

The media may be guilty of exaggerating the results of medical studies, but academic medical centers that hype the results aren’t blameless themselves.

A piece out in the Annals of Internal Medicine takes a look at press releases that academic medical centers sent out about their research, examining such details as whether they gave information on the studies’ size, hard results numbers and cautions about how solid the results are and what they mean. The conclusion: The press releases “often promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health and do not provide key facts or acknowledge important limitations.”

The authors, led by Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth, looked at releases from EurekAlert issued by 20 academic medical centers and their affiliates in 2005. (EurekAlert compiles many press releases and sends them to journalists.) The researchers found that 58 out of 200 releases, or 29%, exaggerated the findings’ importance.

Exaggeration was more common in releases about animal studies than human studies. Out of the 200 releases, 195 included quotes from the scientific investigators: 26% of them were “judged to overstate research importance,” the authors write.

One example they cite: A release from the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah that had to do with a study of mice with skin cancer and was titled, “Scientists inhibit cancer gene.” It quotes the lead investigator, Matthew Topham, saying that the “implication is that a drug therapy could be developed to reduce tumors caused by Ras without significant side effects.” This was an exaggeration, the Dartmouth folks write, because “neither treatment efficacy nor tolerability in humans was assessed.”

We put in a call to Topham, who told us he thought the critique itself was an exaggeration. Though he acknowledged the release could have explicitly said the results wouldn’t necessarily be the same in humans, “we were very careful to say we had done this in mice.” The word “implication” used in the press release “suggests that we have not done anything in humans,” he says, adding he assumed it was common knowledge that animal results don’t always translate into human results.

The authors of the Annals piece didn’t look at how often exaggerated press releases actually resulted in exaggerated news reports. However, they wrote, “We believe that academic centers contribute to poor media coverage and are forgoing an opportunity to help journalists do better.”

Woloshin and Schwartz have written before about medical research and the media, including another piece about flawed press releases from medical journals and one about news reports that “often omit basic study facts and cautions” about research presentations at scientific meetings. They’re not the only ones who make a case that journalists don’t cover medicine very well.