Are Results of Academic Medical Center Reasearch Hyped?
In a recent posting on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, Sarah Rubenstein explores the selective details in press releases from academic medical centers She summarizes an examination by the Annals of Internal Medicine that concluded that such press releases may hype or exaggerate the research results and "often promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health and do not provide key facts or acknowledge important limitations." The Annals of Internal Medicine examined "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 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.
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."