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Over-Hyped Media Coverage Misleads Alzheimer's Disease Research

by Karishma Abhishek on Jun 16 2021 11:44 PM

Over-Hyped Media Coverage Misleads Alzheimer
Among Alzheimer's disease research conducted in mice, 623 scientific papers with media coverage were evaluated. It was revealed that the news media are more likely to write a story about medical research findings if research authors omit mice from their studies' titles whereas, papers that acknowledge mice in their titles had limited media coverage, as per the study titled "What's not in the news headlines or titles of Alzheimer's disease articles? #In mice", published in the journal PLoS Biology.
These over-hyped results add to the concern because scientific findings obtained from animal experiments may have limited relevance to human health and often fail to be replicated in people. Hence the title should be reported with caution and avoid misleading the public with exaggerated news headlines.

"There are around 200 animal models to study Alzheimer disease, and yet the vast majority of potential treatments discovered through experiments on mice are ineffective when tested in humans. Despite this significant flaw in the animal models, we show that articles glossing over the fact that the results were obtained using animals are given increased visibility and therefore implied credibility by the media. The reporting of animal research needs to be addressed with far greater caution and more prominent disclaimers in mainstream media to ensure the public understands that the results of animal experiments may have little to no relevance to human patients," says Dr. Triunfol, one of the study's authors and Humane Society International's scientific advisor.

Over-Hyped Media Coverage

The study team found that out of the 623 papers between 2018 and 2019 in open-access journals and indexed in PubMed, 405 added 'mice' in the titles but 218 made no mention of mice, even though the mice were the main research subjects.

The study also showed that papers that omit mice from their titles generate twice the number of social media tweets compared to papers that do mention mice in the title (18.8 tweets against 9.7 tweets, on average).

Some examples of these media stories are "Common nutrient supplementation may hold the answers to combating Alzheimer's disease", "How flashing lights could treat Alzheimer's disease" & "How Exercise Might 'Clean' the Alzheimer's Brain," among many others.

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These headlines mislead people with Alzheimer's disease and thereby creating false hope. The authors thereby necessitate the implementation of editorial policies, such as the ARRIVE guidelines (an internationally accepted checklist of recommendations to improve the reporting of research involving animals) to improve the accuracy and transparency of science media news concerning Alzheimer's disease research.

Source-Medindia


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