Spin City: Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?  Likewise, the glass can be half-empty or half-full.  It all depends upon your perspective.  However, when it comes to medical research, we shouldn't allow our own biases to color our interpretation of the data.  We don't want to fall into the "Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics" paradigm.  Yet, as I noted yesterday using fish oil as an example, data is too often interpreted rather loosely. I must admit that I am guilty of this, too.  After all, what father doesn't feel that his sons are the most athletic and that his daughter is the most beautiful & talented.

But therein lies the rub.  Publish or perish.  In this day and age of social media and Internet access, getting one's name in front of the world is key to advancement (and fame).  And so what's the harm of putting on rose colored glasses when writing up the press release for one's study?  In a study released two days ago in PLOS Medicine, spin in new reports correlated with spin in press releases which correlated with spin in abstracts.

In fact, the authors noted that close to half the studies had issues with:

     1) not acknowledging lack of statistical significance

     2) allowing for use of larger than standard (not statistically significant) P-values

     3) focusing on subgroup analyses, within-group comparisons & secondary outcomes if primary outcomes were not as expected

     4) incorrect extrapolation or generalization of study group to all populations

     5) improper safety claims.

Bottom line: don't just rely on news reports.  Not even abstracts.  Make sure you go back and dig deep into the study (what I did to survive residency is a crime and especially ironic given what I'm doing now).  I readily acknowledge that unless you're independently wealthy and have no life outside of the office, you're not going to have time to read each article in detail.

But at least make sure the results are statistically significant with P-values <0.05. Make sure the results are also clinically relevant.  If available, read the accompanying editorial as this writer's job is to poke holes in the author's article.  Find out who sponsored the study and which authors might have conflicts of interest due to having received monies from companies with something to gain/lose by this study.  You may not get it right the first time but keep trying.  For your patients' sake.

Follow @alvinblin
Tweet