Misleading Headline and Story on Anxiety and Dementia

"Staying Calm 'Prevents Dementia," is the headline on a BBC article today. Seems like an innocuous headline but in fact it is both wrong and misleading.As a group, older people who scored as "calm and relaxed" in their answers to a survey had a 50% lower risk of developing dementia over the next six years, the BBC reported. (There's another no-no: giving a relative risk figure without giving the

More Sloppy Headlines on Parkinson's Disease

What's wrong with these headlines--one from HealthDay News and the other from ABC News Radio?First Gene Therapy Trial Effective Against Parkinson's and New Parkinson's TreatmentA reasonable person would conclude that there's a new treatment involving gene therapy for Parkinson's disease. In fact, the study in question, which was just published in the research journal Lancet, was not even designed

Stupid Headline Award (Oral Sex Category)

The "award" for worst headline of the week goes to The Register in the U.K. for its recent article titled "Oral sex could be more dangerous than cigars." This craven attempt to titillate readers deliberately mis-characterized the results of a recent study about oral cancer in the New England Journal of Medicine.Making matters worse, Lewis Page, the author of the Register piece, goes on to say

Sloppy Headlines on Parkinson's Disease

Here's a catchy headline that's guaranteed to get your attention: "Smoking and Caffeine May Protect Against Parkinson's Disease."It was written by the good folks at the Duke University press office. But it does a disservice to anyone who has Parkinson's disease, or cares for or loves someone with the neuro-degenerative condition.To make matters worse, it gave journalists permission to use

Premature Babies and Happy Endings

Readers sometimes wonder whether journalists allow their politics or their advertisers to influence how the news is covered. But I've noticed a different bias over the years in coverage about extremely premature infants. Call it the bias in favor of a happy ending.Take, for example, the opening sentences from Monday's article by Erika Beras in the Miami Herald under the headline "Miracle Baby

Autism Gene Is Found--Or Is It?

Headlines are often major sources of error. The Canadian Press just ran a story under the banner "Autism Gene Found." Trouble is, if you read the CP story, or the scientific study in Nature Genetics on which it was based, it's clear that no single gene--or even collection of genes--for autism has been found. Instead, researchers scanned genetic samples from 1,400 carefully selected families with