Best of the AHCJ list: Evaluating newsworthiness of medical studies

AHCJ ELECTRONIC MAILING LIST The list is a service for all AHCJ members. RELATED How a medical story makes its way to the front page (Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 2007)

A recent query on the AHCJ electronic mailing list from Mark Tosczak, of The Business Journal Serving the Greater Triad Area, raised the issue of how to evaluate the significance and newsworthiness of a medical study. The question drew several useful responses from members and we thought it would be useful to share those tips and others here.

Dave Rumbach of the South Bend Tribune and Mary Cresse of HCPro Inc. point out that reporters should understand the research well enough to be able to explain it in two or three common-language sentences. You must be able to make the story accessible to your readers.

Decide whether the study matters. As freelancer Kurt Ullman pointed out, a study about infections in toenails would probably be less worthy of your time than one on obesity, heart disease or some of the other big issues.

Rumbach says reporters must decide whether the study is credible. This will require a working knowledge of concepts like placebo-control, blinding, sample size, odds ratio vs. relative risk.

Gary Schwitzer's Web site, HealthNewsReview.org, has some primers that cover topics such as covering news from scientific meetings, single-source stories, phases of drug trials, devices, animal and lab studies, absolute vs. relative risk and lists criteria his site uses to evaluate stories. Those criteria include:

• Does the claim quantify benefits?
• Does the claim quantify harms?
• Does it quantify in absolute vs. just relative terms?
• Does it put the new idea in the context of existing alternatives?

Wendy Wolfson reminds reporters to look at the size and duration of the study and whether there are repeated studies.

AHCJ board member Kristen Hallam, of Bloomberg, describes a guide from the Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth. Some of the questions on that checklist include:

• What is the assertion?
• If true, would you care?
• Who stands to benefit from the assertion?
• How good is the evidence? (Does it come from multiple studies? How good are they?)

Cresse suggests having contacts in the medical field who will help you pinpoint the relevance of a study. Queries to them would be for background research and might offer suggestions of others in the field to interview. Other questions she suggests:

• Who funded the study?
• What question or problem was the study meant to solve?
• What were the expected results vs. the real results?

Rose Hoban, a nurse and health reporter for North Carolina Public Radio suggests:

• Is there a local angle? Local data, local researcher or local topic?
• Was the research done on people or animals? Hoban says she doesn't report on animal studies.
• Is this a treatment that's happening now and can affect someone's life? If so, Hoban will report on it. If it is 10 years down the road, she'll wait to report on it when it's more likely.
• Where is it being published? If it's in JAMA she would report on it but would be less likely to if it appears in a "journal of inconsequential podiatric research."

The National Institutes of Health's Office of Medical Applications of Research offers a free short course every year to help journalists learn how to evaluate and report on medical research.