Paul S. Mueller, MD, MPH, FACP reviewing Sumner P et al. BMJ 2014 Dec 10.
Explicit claims often are reported that are not backed up by corresponding peer-reviewed research articles.
Healthcare institutions use press releases to convey the results of research studies to news media; however, some press releases exaggerate findings and lack appropriate caveats. In this study, researchers determined how often press releases and news stories contained claims and advice that distorted or exaggerated those presented in corresponding peer-reviewed original research articles.
The researchers identified 462 press releases issued in 2011 by 20 leading U.K. universities, the press releases' associated peer-reviewed research articles, and 688 related print and online news stories. Forty percent of press releases contained more direct or explicit advice than the associated journal articles did. The odds of exaggerated advice in a news story were seven times higher when the press release also contained exaggerated advice than when it did not. For correlational results, one third of press releases were more deterministic (causal) than the associated research articles. For nonhuman studies, one third of press releases contained inflated claims regarding implications for humans. However, the presence of exaggeration in press releases was not associated with a greater number of related news stories.
