Do your patients receive accurate health news?
Study finds many health news reports misleading
Nearly one in four news stories about health research and older women omits crucial information, according to a recently released study from The National Council on the Aging (NCOA) in Washington, DC. This could have serious implications for the health of your patients because in a separate survey of more than 1,000 middle-age women, 81% said they were satisfied with the media’s reporting of health issues.
"Both studies underscore the importance of going beyond the headlines," says Lynn Beattie, director of health education programs for NCOA. "Women need to get more complete information about medical issues to better understand their risk for diseases. We recommend that women read and watch more critically and talk with their doctors to put medical news in perspective."
(NCOA has developed some new consumer tools to help with that dialogue between patients and their doctors. See p. 195.)
The audit of health news reporting in print, television, and radio reports was conducted by researchers at Columbia University in New York City. Researchers reviewed news stories that mentioned older women’s health and any of these five diseases — Alzheimer’s, breast cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and osteoporosis — during the period from Jan. 1, 1998, through March 31, 1999.
Findings of the media audit include:
• 24% of stories on reported research did not mention limitations of the research, such as small sample size.
• Few stories mentioned other medical stories on the same subject.
• Even though heart disease is the leading killer of women, there are more stories in the media about breast cancer. For every 100 articles that mentioned breast cancer, there were only 64 that mentioned heart disease, 43 that mentioned osteoporosis, 34 that mentioned Alzheimer’s disease, and 19 that mentioned lung cancer.
"The media have done a good job of listening to their audience and providing what this audience wants," says Steve Ross, PhD, associate professor and director of the science and health writing program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, who conducted the media audit for NCOA. "But when a health story in the press leaves out vital information about research news, it makes it much harder for consumers to accurately assess their own risk."
The subsequent survey of 1,018 women ages 45 to 64 found that women trust health reports in the news and feel they are well-informed about women’s health issues. The findings include the following:
• 96% of women report feeling well-informed and up-to-date on women’s health issues.
• 81% are satisfied with how the media provide information about women’s health issues.
• 38% of women receive health information from television.
• 34% receive health information from magazines.
• 17% receive health information from newspapers.
• 3% receive health information from the Internet, compared with 2% from the radio and 6% from other sources.
• Equal proportions of women (25% for each) cited heart disease and breast cancer as the single disease they were most concerned about.
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