Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism
“Short people have higher heart risk” screams the headline on CNN.com, treating it as a statement of fact.
“Shortness Boosts Heart Disease, Death Risk” is the headline in a HealthDay story seen on BusinessWeek.com. Wrong.
Such a study as the one being described can only establish association; it CANNOT prove causation. So it is wrong to say short people have higher risk. It is wrong to say shortness boosts risk.
Blogger and cardiac electrophysiologist Wes Fisher beat me to the punch by
Overall, this was an easy-to-follow summary. But there was a clear difference between this and a competing Boston Globe story, which did a better job offering context and analysis.
This Boston Globe blog post gave its audience a more thorough understanding of an emerging approach to virtual colonoscopy than the Wall Street Journal.
Longer, but overall not any better, than the coverage from the competing LA Times story. Not thorough enough to explain what this preliminary research actually means for readers–which is not much at this point.
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