Health & Science blog

By Rebecca Knight

Have you ever read a newspaper article about cancer risk and felt anxious that something you do – or neglect to do – puts you in danger of developing a terrible disease? Or have you ever watched a television news report about a new cancer drug and felt optimistic – perhaps too optimistic – about a promising breakthrough?
 
It happens every day, according to an editorial published earlier this month in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The editorial, written by the editor and researchers at the Center for Medicine and the Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire, discusses the exaggerated fears and hopes that often appear in news coverage of cancer research. Promoting Healthy Skepticism in the News: Helping Journalists Get It Right 

The authors cite recent media coverage of two studies from the New England Journal of Medicine and the JNCI to demonstrate their point.
 
Coverage of trial results of the new anti-cancer drug Olaparib, which appeared in the NEJM, inflated hope in many ways, they say. One network news group, for instance, heralded the drug as “the most important cancer breakthrough of the decade” and said that the drug would “eventually save thousands of lives”.

This outlet, however, failed to note that the study was uncontrolled so there is no way to know if the effects of the drug explained the findings, or that the study was very preliminary – it is not known if the findings will actually translate into longer life.
 
The editorial also points to coverage of a JNCI article on alcohol consumption and cancer risk among women, which they say may have caused unwarranted worry.

One newspaper headline read: “A drink a day raises women’s risk of cancer”. But the story did not provide the magnitude of the risk. Comparing the highest level of drinking (more than 15 drinks a week) to the lowest (one to two drinks per week), the investigators observed a 0.6 per cent absolute increase in the risk of breast cancer diagnosis: from 2 per cent to 2.6 per cent for more than seven years.
 
Journalists are partly to blame, according to the editorial. But medical journals are also culpable because articles often leave out key elements from studies, and absolute risks and study limitations are absent from the abstracts and journal press releases. Researchers add to the problem as the “combination of strong beliefs and self-interest can be an irresistible recipe” for overstatement, they say.
 
To help journalists and medical journals, the authors created a tip sheet: Reporting on Cancer Research with guidance on questions to ask study authors, the interpretation of common statistics, and ways to highlight study limitations. “We hope that efforts…will help foster healthy skepticism in the news,” the authors write.