Better journalistic standards for reporting on medical tests will mean better informed health care consumers
Screening of healthy groups in the population and diagnostic testing on suspicion of disease are fundamental components of health care delivery and disease prevention. As the general media are important sources of health information for consumers, accurate and balanced reporting is essential. Media reporting of diagnostic tests is skewed towards screening tests, particularly cancer screening, and the quality of coverage appears poor.1-3 However, there are no data on how well the media cover stories about diagnostic tests used to confirm disease. The statistics used to quantify diagnostic test accuracy (sensitivity, specificity and the predictive value of positive and negative tests) are difficult to understand, so conveying this information to the public is a challenging task for journalists.3,4 In this article, we review stories written about diagnostic and screening tests in the Australian media, and propose some questions that journalists covering these topics could use.
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- 1. MacKenzie R, Chapman S, Barratt A, Holding S. “The news is [not] all good”: misrepresentations and inaccuracies in Australian news media reports on prostate cancer screening. Med J Aust 2007; 187: 507-510.
- 2. Grimes DA, Schulz KF. Uses and abuses of screening tests. Lancet 2002; 359: 881-884.
- 3. Gigerenzer G, Gaissmaier W, Kurz-Milcke E, et al. Helping doctors and patients make sense of health statistics. Psychol Sci Public Interest 2007; 8: 53-96.
- 4. Bramwell R, West H, Salmon P. Health professionals’ and service users’ interpretation of screening test results: experimental study. BMJ 2006; 333: 284.
- 5. Media Doctor. Rating information. mediadoctor.org.au/content/ratinginformation.jsp (accessed Aug 2012).
- 6. Australian Press Council. Health and medical matters (guideline). Sydney, APC, 2011. http://www.presscouncil.org.au/document-search/guideline-health/?LocatorGroupID=662&LocatorFormID=677&FromSearch=1 (accessed Aug 2012).
- 7. Wilson A, Bonevski B, Jones A, Henry D. Media reporting of health interventions: signs of improvement, but major problems persist. PLoS ONE 2009; 4: e4831.
- 8. O’Leary C. New scanner aims to detect breast cancer in young women. The West Australian [Perth] 2009; 27 Jun. http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/5807118/new-scanner-aims-to-detect-breast-cancer-in-young-women (accessed Aug 2012).
- 9. Agence France-Presse. Alzheimer’s can be predicted with ‘100 per cent accuracy’. The Australian 2010; 16 Aug. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/alzheimers-can-be-predicted-with-100-per-cent-accuracy/story-e6frg6so-1225903663351 (accessed Aug 2012).
- 10. Stark J. Breast “tests” could offer false sense of security. Sydney Morning Herald 2010; 19 Sep. http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/breast-tests-could-offer-false-sense-of-security-20100918-15h4j.html (accessed Aug 2012).
- 11. Metlikovec J. Parkinson’s test warning. Herald Sun [Melbourne] 2007; 27 Apr. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/parkinsons-test-warning/story-e6frf7kx-1111113420339 (accessed Aug 2012).
- 12. Catalona WJ, Richie JP, Ahmann FR, et al. Comparison of digital rectal examination and serum prostate specific antigen in the early detection of prostate cancer: results of a multicenter clinical trial of 6,630 men. J Urol 1994; 151: 1283-1290.
- 13. Welch HG, Schwartz LM, Woloshin S. Ramifications of screening for breast cancer: 1 in 4 cancers detected by mammography are pseudocancers. BMJ 2006; 332: 727.
- 14. Lauer MS. Pseudodisease, the next great epidemic in coronary atherosclerosis? [comment]. Arch Intern Med 2011; 171: 1268-1269. doi: 10.1001/archinternmed.2011.205.
- 15. Vashlishan Murray AB, Carson MJ, Morris CA, Beckwith J. Illusions of scientific legitimacy: misrepresented science in the direct-to-consumer genetic-testing marketplace. Trends Genet 2010; 26: 459-461.
- 16. Standards for the Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy. STARD checklist for the reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy. http://www.stard-statement.org (accessed Aug 2012).
We thank Marc Bevan for major contributions to this article through data collection and analysis, writing and editing.
No relevant disclosures.