A few months ago, there was a news article that I saw about how there is "strong evidence" of viral involvement in the Alzheimer's Disease. It was written by Medical News Today and it stated that post-mortem analysis showed that those who had Alzheimer's had more herpesvirus 6 and herpesvirus 7 than those who did not have Alzheimer's Disease. The news article mentioned another two other journal articles that stated that using antiherpetic medication would lower the risk of dementia by 10 times.
This article is extremely exciting and it sounds like research is really expanding on potentials ways that doctors could treat Alzheimer's in the future. However, I remembered the importance of not taking things at face value. While the research is exciting and true, I think this reminds me of why it is important to evaluate research on an individual basis instead of getting it from a secondary source.
I took the time to briefly read over the research article and the brief overview of the commentary that was mentioned and it became clear that the news article barely covered the surface of the research. The research article expands on genes and proteins involved in viral replication--it can be difficult for the average person to read.
Moreover, the Medical News Today article cited a professor who did a commentary on the research more than they did the actually primary sources. This emphasizes the errors of how scientific knowledge is portrayed by the media and how it is shared with the general population. In fact, in the commentary article, the author states that there is a causal link between herpes virus and dementia. However, in the discussion of the research paper, they note that the findings do not definitively show that viral activity causes progression/onset of Alzheimer's Disease. So. . . who is right?
It is great that the general population can access these articles and understand them far better than the primary sources. However, that does not mean that these secondary articles are able to properly conclude the findings and results. How do you think scientific knowledge should be shared? Should news/media be able to summarize scientific papers if they could possibly misinterpret the results?
References:
Itzhaki, R. F., & Lathe, R. (2018). Herpes Viruses and Senile Dementia: First Population Evidence for a Causal Link. Journal of Alzheimers Disease, 64(2), 363–366. doi: 10.3233/jad-180266b
Readhead, B., Haure-Mirande, J. V., Funk, C. C., Richards, M. A., Shannon, P., Haroutunian, V., et al. (2018). Neuron 99, 64.e7–82.e7. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2018.05.023
Ph.D., C. P. (2018, June 21). Alzheimer's: 'Strong evidence' of virus involvement. Retrieved from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322223.php.
Unfortunately, this issue is not new and misinterpretation of data is widely abundant in the media. Commentary from one person or a small group of people suddenly becomes scientific fact because CNN decides to do a late night coverage of a "study" with a sexy tag line like "Wine makes you skinny". There are some very obvious cases such as the whole "vaccines cause autism" hoopla, which despite the evident fraud, misinterpretation of data, and terrible scientific method, was announced by one ex-doctor and created a huge following. The sad truth is that people will not read primary literature every time they see an interesting tag line to ensure that they do not perpetuate false information. Honestly, I do not blame them because in a lot of ways scientific literature is very difficult to comb through. You bring up a really good point, who should be allowed to "interpret" scientific data, and does this change if they are in a position of power (like a news reporter or journalist)?
ReplyDelete