I don't have the link to this story, but I'm sure that a search of CNN will turn it up somewhere.
======================================================
CNN.com - JAMA: Don't believe everything you read - June 4, 2002
JAMA: Don't believe everything you read
June 4, 2002 Posted: 7:00 PM EDT (2300 GMT)
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- One of the world's leading medical journals has
put itself and its competitors under the microscope with research showing
that published studies are sometimes misleading and frequently fail to
mention weaknesses.
Some problems can be traced to biases and conflicts of interest among peer
reviewers, who are outside scientists tapped by journal editors to help
decide whether a research paper should be published, according to several
articles in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Other problems originate in news releases some journals prepare to call
attention to what they believe are newsworthy studies. The releases do not
routinely mention study limitations or industry funding and may exaggerate
the importance of findings, according to one JAMA study.
Wednesday's JAMA, devoted entirely to such issues, "is our attempt to
police ourselves, to question ourselves and to look at better ways to make
sure that we're honest and straightforward and maintain the integrity of
the journals," said Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA's editor.
The articles "underscore that the findings presented in the press and
medical journals are not always facts or as certain as they seem," said
Rob Logan, director of the Science Journalism Center at the University of
Missouri-Columbia.
DeAngelis said problems are most likely to occur in research funded by
drug companies, which have a vested interest in findings that make their
products look good.
Journal editors are concerned that manufacturers sometimes unduly
influence how researchers report study results, and even suppress
unfavorable findings.
Many top journals require researchers to disclose any ties to drug
companies, and Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor of the New England Journal of
Medicine, said editors rely on researchers to be truthful.
"I imagine that from time to time we screw up" and fail to adequately
mention drug company ties, but that is infrequent, Drazen said.
Favoring favorable statistics
One JAMA report found that medical journal studies on new treatments often
use only the most favorable statistic in reporting results, said author
Dr. Jim Nuovo of the University of California at Davis.
His study reviewed 359 studies published between 1989 and 1998 in JAMA,
The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the British Medical
Journal and Annals of Internal Medicine. Only 26 studies reported
straightforward statistics that clearly assessed the effect on patients.
Most reported only the "relative risk reduction" linked to a specific
treatment, which is the percentage difference between drug-treated
patients and those in a placebo group. That figure is more misleading than
the "absolute risk reduction," which
measures the actual difference between the treatment results compared with
the placebo group, Nuovo said.
-- continued --