Checkup: Medical journal faults reporting on health issues

Adapted from The Post's daily health blog.

Rx: Take health news with a grain of salt

It would be nice to think that you could trust journalists to deliver the straight scoop when it comes to covering health news.

But sometimes we don't. Journalists' getting health stories wrong is the subject of an editorial published online Nov. 20 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It notes two examples of major health stories gone awry.

Journalists covering trial results of a new anti-cancer drug, olaparib, called it "the most important cancer breakthrough of the decade," the editorial notes, even though the study did not include a control group and was very preliminary. Both are factors that considerably weaken that "most important" claim.

In another instance, the findings of a medical journal article about women's alcohol consumption and their risk of cancer were misrepresented in an alarmist way, with headlines screaming that a drink a day raises women's breast cancer risk. What the journalists failed to mention, the editorial points out, is that the absolute increase in risk was quite small, a difference between 2 percent risk of getting breast cancer in seven years for the lightest drinkers and 2.6 percent for the heaviest drinkers.

The editorial doesn't place all the blame on health reporters. Its authors acknowledge that medical journals sometimes fail to present all the details about study limitations and such, so journalists don't have all the facts to work with. And press releases announcing new research findings may omit key elements, too.

-- Jennifer LaRue Huget