‘Cure’ exaggeration
A Herald headline says “Dementia cure just five years away – world expert“. That’s even worse than the Telegraph headline for the original piece “Dementia cure may be just five years away, says world expert“.
The ‘world expert’ is Dennis Gillings, an expert in clinical trials, who is the G8 ‘World Dementia Envoy’, so his opinions are worth listening to. What he says doesn’t really support the headline.
Dr Gillings… said progress was being made on treatments that might halt or reverse the progress of dementia, with some kind of brain training used to help rebuild lost neural pathways.
and
scientists increasingly believed it had been a mistake to treat dementia as one disease, saying it was likely that breakthroughs would come from targeting subtypes of the condition.
and
Saluting recent British investment in science, and the creation of a 150 million Dementia Research Institute, he said that, none the less, breakthroughs were more likely in the US, which put more money into research
If a cure was actually going to be available in five years you would have heard about its success in early clinical trials already. He’s talking about making scientific progress within five years to identify a cure, with breakthroughs still needed.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
This is the kind of oversell that is absolutely predictable on almost any medical research story I have ever seen. If I had a dollar for every one of these “over the top” headlines, I would be a millionaire by now!
9 years ago