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American Morning

Leading Medical Journal Admits Some Articles Don't Tell Whole Story

Aired June 06, 2002 - 08:42   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Time for a "House Call." Hardly a day goes by without a new medical study coming out about something. Many of us pay pretty close attention, often making some important decisions based on what we hear. But now, a leading medical journal admits that some of its articles don't tell the whole story.

Say it ain't so, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. He joins us from Atlanta this morning to talk about telling the whole truth in medical reporting.

Good morning.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.

And just for the record, I am always willing to admit my own fallacies, just to put that out there.

ZAHN: So you're not God after all.

GUPTA: Never said I was, always willing to admit.

ZAHN: I'm just giving you a hard time. You know what some of this perspective is of patients around their country. They think that some of their doctors act that way far too often, not all of them.

GUPTA: Right. Well, you know, the other thing is there are lots of medical headlines out there. And all these medical headlines, you hear about them, they're often very splashy, and they're hard to make sense of. Let me just start right away with a couple examples.

First example, "Canadian study is first to show` screening reduces prostate cancer death." This story made the front page of "The New York Times," made all sorts of headlines in all sorts of different media outlets, and then we never heard about it again. It was just sort of gone. It turned out that the study was actually had all kind of flaws in it; it didn't pan out the way they thought it was going to pan out, and we just never heard about it again.

Another example, "Raloxifene may reduce risk of endometrial cancer in post-menopausal women." Again, another study, lots of headlines, and we never heard about it again once the study was critically analyzed.

And we say all kinds of headlines like that a lot, and then we never hear about the follow-up studies, or never actually pan out into anything clinical, and let's a look at some of the reasons why. If you actually look at the studies, you'll find that 80 percent of the time, experiments were tried on animals, and those experiments didn't actually subsequently pan out to work in human beings.

Also, vested interest research funding. What this means is a lot of the time the pharmaceutical companies will fund the research on their own particular drug. That's something to look out for if you see that happening.

Lack of critical counteropinions. And what that basically means is if it's too good to be true, it probably is. If you're not seeing any negative things about the particular drug, the particular procedure, that could be a problem.

Also, the most favorable statistic is often the one that is often most reported, and that's because if that favorable statistic is what they want to make headlines with, they oftentimes won't show you the negative sides. You've got to look a little deeper for that.

And finally, the studies often apply just to limited groups. Now what that means is a lot of these studies are done on young, healthy people. So when that same drug is released to the general public, and you've got women, older people and kids taking it, oftentimes side effects from those procedures or drugs start to come out. So those are some things to look out for.

ZAHN: Now as a consumer, what are some of the things that we can see as red flags when we're trying to determine how seriously we should take this study? And clearly we don't have your medical background. You know, when to take this stuff with a grain of salt.

GUPTA: Yes, well, I think those are certainly some of the things, and also you'll see a lot of things sort of getting over- reported, and just because you're hearing about it a lot doesn't make it very significant.

A good example, I think you mentioned earlier, Paula, West Nile Virus. West Nile Virus, we heard a lot about it. It was a strange disease that came from a different continent. It affected birds. It affected human beings, and it seemed to kill at least a few people. In fact, it caused a lot of scares. Let's hear what some of the` people had to say about it just last summer.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're waiting for it any day. And West Nile just adds a little bit more worry to our lifestyles.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's not a good thing to have. It's pretty deadly.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I have a small child, so it's a little scary for me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GUPTA: And as it turns out, West Nile Virus did not have nearly the epidemiological effect that we thought it was going to effect. The flu kills hundreds of thousands more people each year, but you don't hear about that nearly as much last summer as we heard about West Nile.

ZAHN: Ten seconds left. Where do we go to find the most reliable information?

have this medical background, you know, when to take this stuff with a grain of salt.

GUPTA: These are a lot of good sites out there. Let's just put them up. These are some of the sites that we use a lot. They are NIH.gov, CDC, but you can read the sites yourself.

But most importantly, you get a lot of information from these Web sites. You still do need to contextualize it with your doctor. Your doctors aren't always God, Paula, but they can put the information in some context for you. Here's some tips if you're going to go see your doctor. You can read those there. Write things down in case you want a second opinion from somewhere else. A lot of doctors will encourage you to do that.

ZAHN: For the record, I like all my doctors.

GUPTA: Good, do you like this one, too?

ZAHN: Yes, I like our "House Call" doctor, too, because you're honest. You admit when there are flaws in this stuff. We like that.

GUPTA: Absolutely.

ZAHN: See you tomorrow.

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