Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism
When a study appeared in JAMA earlier this week pointing to an association between circulating levels of omega-3 fatty acids with a change in telomere length 5 years later (if you really care about this stuff, you can look up the study), many news organizations jumped on it. Another omega-3 fatty acid story!!!
One friend referred to this as “making a biological mountain out of a mole hill.”
Oh, you mean, like ABC and Diane Sawyer leading into the story with one of Jon Stewart’s least favorite TV ploys – the question mark graphic or tease.
Fountain of youth? You’d have to stay tuned to learn that the answer is “no.”
Treatment for advanced ovarian tumors may lengthen survival, but questions still remain, despite the story’s emphasis on “promising” and “new hope.”
As with the HealthDay story on this research that we reviewed, readers of this story get a good dose of caveats and cautions along with the suggestions that electrical brain stimulation might someday “have implications” for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
The readers of this story and the other one we reviewed by Reuters are likely to understand that electrical brain stimulation could have some memory effects, but it’s a long way from becoming a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
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