Samad Lilianne, Reed J E
Research & Development, Bayer Crop Science, Chesterfield, MO, USA.
Glob Epidemiol. 2025 Feb 8;9:100188. doi: 10.1016/j.gloepi.2025.100188. eCollection 2025 Jun.
It is common to see mass media headlines about health-related topics in traditional and online news outlets, as well as on social media platforms. What a consumer might not realize is that often these headlines are a distillation of results reported in epidemiologic publications. Journalists make decisions about what information to include and exclude, hopefully without compromising the main conclusions. In this exercise, sixty-three media articles that summarized one peer-reviewed journal publication (Zhang et al., 2021) describing results from a cohort study on coffee and tea consumption and risk of stroke and dementia were compared to determine the consistency of details among them. The most heterogeneity was observed in whether articles compared results with other literature. There was some variation in inclusion of a measure of frequency within the study population, and in details describing measurement of exposure. However, most of the articles were consistent in either including or excluding other methodological details in the main text. The results of the present comparison have implications for readers, researchers, and journalists. Readers must know that media summaries of peer reviewed studies are just that - summaries. It is likely that some information from the original source is not represented by the article, and that additional information might be necessary to craft an informed opinion on a given topic.
在传统新闻媒体、在线新闻平台以及社交媒体上，经常能看到有关健康相关话题的大众媒体头条。消费者可能没有意识到的是，这些头条往往是流行病学出版物中所报道结果的提炼。记者会决定纳入和排除哪些信息，希望不会损害主要结论。在本研究中，对63篇总结了一篇同行评审期刊文章（Zhang等人，2021年）的媒体文章进行了比较，该期刊文章描述了一项关于咖啡和茶的消费与中风及痴呆风险的队列研究结果，以确定这些文章之间细节的一致性。在文章是否将结果与其他文献进行比较方面，观察到的异质性最大。在纳入研究人群中的频率测量方法以及描述暴露测量的细节方面存在一些差异。然而，大多数文章在正文中纳入或排除其他方法学细节方面是一致的。本次比较的结果对读者、研究人员和记者都有启示。读者必须明白，同行评审研究的媒体总结仅仅是总结而已。原始资料中的某些信息可能未在文章中体现，而且可能需要更多信息才能对特定主题形成明智的观点。
