Retinal scans to detect heart attack risk? Newsweek offers a blurry picture

Does the story adequately discuss the costs of the intervention?

Not Satisfactory

This Newsweek story offers no information on what the cost of such retinal scan might be, nor does it mention whether health insurance would cover such screening, if it is proven to eventually work.  There are a number of free cardiovascular risk assessment tools available online.

Does the story adequately quantify the benefits of the treatment/test/product/procedure?

Not Satisfactory

The only numerical data offered by this story is that they used “data from more than a quarter of a million patients.”  There is no comparison of the success rate of this new approach with other mechanisms for determining cardiovascular risk, so readers have no way of assessing its potential value.

Does the story adequately explain/quantify the harms of the intervention?

Not Satisfactory

The story offers no mention of potential harms that might arise from using this new approach and since it would be non-invasive, it is hard to imagine many.  But the potential for incorrect assessments is always present as either false-positives or false-negatives and the harms from either of those can be considerable.

Does the story seem to grasp the quality of the evidence?

Not Satisfactory

The story really doesn’t offer any evidence of the success of this approach.  The only statement that relates to results from this research says, “the scientists were able to predict the cardiovascular risk factors that were not previously thought to be present in retinal fundus images.”  But how effective were those?  How does this method compare with other techniques for determining cardiovascular risk?

The published abstract pointed out that the results were “validated on two independent datasets of 12,026 and 999 patients” suggesting that some additional data was available to the story’s author.  It’s not clear that any patient has been tested using this method, even though both the headline an the lede sentence of the story emphatically state it works.

Does the story commit disease-mongering?

Not Satisfactory

There’s no outright disease-mongering here. However, the story provides no context about how many people are at risk of a heart attack. For that reason, it doesn’t meet our criteria.

Does the story use independent sources and identify conflicts of interest?

Not Satisfactory

The story does point out that the researchers work for “Google’s parent company Alphabet” and for the company Verily, which used to be Google Life Sciences, so the conflict of interest is obvious.  But it fails to identify any of the researchers, even though it includes two quotes from a nameless source.  No independent sources are quoted.

Does the story establish the availability of the treatment/test/product/procedure?

Not Satisfactory

The story indicates that “further tests” are needed, but readers are left with no idea as to when, if ever, this new approach to determining risk might be available.  There’s no mention of when, if ever, clinical trials might be done to gauge its efficacy.