From the Telegraph

Sportswomen should go on the pill to avoid career-ending injuries, the authors of a groundbreaking study have suggested.

Analysis of more than 165,000 female athletes in the US found those taking the oral contraceptive were significantly less likely to suffer knee injuries.

There’s a few problems with this as a summary of the research(press release)  The study didn’t measure knee injuries — it measured ACL surgeries. More importantly, it wasn’t of female athletes, but of any women aged 15 to 49 in a big medical-records database who weren’t pregnant and didn’t have a known connective tissue disorder — the study didn’t have any data at all on physical activity. Also, ‘groundbreaking’ seems a bit much given that the research paper talks about previous studies with similar results, as well as biochemical reasons that there might be a relationship.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the Telegraph story, though is how it relates to this graph from the research paper. Basically the whole association is driven by the 15-19 age group.

This is obviously an important research question in sports medicine, and of public interest, but that makes it more important to get things right. The Guardian and the Miami Herald did a lot better at describing who was studied and the limitations of the results — such as not assessing physical activity at all.