Not Satisfactory
While it’s too early to quantify benefits, since this wasn’t a clinical study, we think the story is misleading in extrapolating the potential benefits, or paraphrasing the researchers’ hopes for their research’s success without question. It says "the team found they could not only distinguish between healthy and malignant breath but also identify the four different common tumor types." It was a retrospective analysis of data, not a blinded study: these were not clinical distinctions or clinical identifications of people with cancer and those without. As we’ve noted, the "healthy people" were defined by subjective descriptions while those with cancer had been diagnosed using conventional tests. We think the benefits described are misleading.
Not Satisfactory
There’s almost no evaluation of the evidence. As we discussed in the "Availability" criterion above, this was a preliminary, retrospective, statistical analysis of data in a laboratory, not a clinical test of an actual diagnostic technique. Readers should’ve been told the difference.
Citing 177 people is a big number but a meaningless one without knowing what was done. (A hyperbolic example: consider the quality of evidence from a web poll with 177 respondents compared to a randomized, controlled, double-blind, multi-center clinical study in 177 people.) We’re told vaguely that more work is needed, but the sentence construction — "While more work is needed, the early success…" — makes clinical success seem like a foregone conclusion. People would be shocked to learn how many techniques with "early success" ultimately fail in the real world where real lives are at stake. The researcher states "if we can confirm these initial results in large-scale studies," which is good of him, but the tone and unbounded optimism of the article gives us no reason whatsoever to think this preliminary evidence won’t be confirmed.
The evidence in this lab study, in fact, appears to have used data from existing laboratory techniques of gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to inform that of the novel nanoarray, and also compared the uses of the techniques. It highlights the early nature of the evidence, as the study was about the development and laboratory analysis of the technique, not clinical outcomes.
There’s another limitation in the evidence that’s worth pointing out. According to the abstract: "The healthy population was healthy according to subjective patient’s data." The study itself states that the cancer population had been diagnosed by conventional tests. That questions the relevance of the study to the article’s presentation of the approach as a way to detect cancer early — before it has symptoms, before it would be diagnosed otherwise. Because we don’t know if the control group also had early but asymptomatic or undiagnosed cancer.
Should a reporter be expected to critically evaluate all these questions when writing a 6 paragraph summary of a study? We think that if the study is as preliminary as this one, and the technique as far from touching clinical practice as this one, then yes, we expect an article to do more than repeat the optimistic hopes of the investigators themselves without any independent evaluation. Otherwise, isn’t it just a press release from the investigators?
Not Satisfactory
The story is vague and speculative about the advantages of the theoretical clinical test, such as the presumed uses and benefits in early detection. By being vague, it casts a wide net over an undefined population that the technology could presumably help. The story mentions the "four different common tumor types" of lung, breast, bowel and prostate. But not all cancers are equal. Not all pre-cancers are equal. There is controversy even with today’s screening methods about the benefits/harms of screening for some of these cancers in some populations. None of that nuance is even touched on. Should readers be worried about EVERYTHING? That’s disease-mongering.
Satisfactory
On the plus side, it tells us that the study builds on earlier research from last year, and we give it the benefit of the doubt. On the minus, the story is vague about the novelty of breath testing for cancer, which was not a new approach invented by this group in even its last study.
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