An Epidemiologist Reads the News by Cecile Janssens

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AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST READS THE NEWS Why Health Reportage May Not Be as Healthy as You Think CECILE JANSSENS

Recently, the New York Times reported that ‘Sleeping 9 Hours a Night May Raise Stroke Risk’ and then, one week later, ‘Poor Sleep Tied to Heart Disease and Stroke’. How on earth can any of us make sense of this?

As an epidemiologist, Cecile Janssens knows how to decipher the science behind the headlines: she knows what the numbers mean and what the caveats are. In this book she shares her expertise so we too can hack the medical and health news and make better decisions about how to live our lives.

In each chapter, she focuses on a widely publicised study reported in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal and dealing with a common disease. Whether the findings are reliable depends, she shows, on how researchers set up their studies – on the participants invited, questions asked, tests run and so on. Increasingly, the data researchers use aren’t their own, but come from the pooling of many previous studies, a practice fraught with difficulties and often giving rise to meaningless associations, even though the researchers state they are 'statistically significant'. This is just one of several redflag phrases to watch out for, she says. If you you read that a study is ‘the first to show’, then it is safe to assume that its claims are exaggerated or premature. Similarly, a study that purports to have ‘controlled for all the relevant risk factors’ may have left out the most important one.

Then there are the tricks journalists use to make a study look juicier than it is. Journalists dress up numbers to camouflage small effects – rather than saying there is a 1.05-fold increase in risk, they say the risk is 5 per cent higher. And they succumb to credibility by association: a study from Harvard University, published in the Lancet and involving 86 participants just seems more impressive and worthwhile reporting than a study from Oklahoma State University, published in Scientific Reports and involving 257 participants. What’s more, they try to appear critical by regurgitating disclaimers from press releases – 'correlation does not mean causation’, ‘the findings need to be replicated in a larger study’, 'the results are observational’, 'the data were self-reported’ or ‘the study duration was short’ – without properly investigating deeper problems that may entirely invalidate the research.

If you are struggling to understand the mixed messages in health reportage, then this smart, witty and revealing book will prove to be your essential guide to navigating this media minefield.

CECILE JANSSENS is a professor of epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta and a science columnist with the premier Dutch newspaper NRC. An expert on the genetic prediction of common diseases, she teaches courses at Emory on ‘Critiquing Health News’ and ‘Critical Reasoning: Exploring the Science Behind the News’. She was awarded a Public Voices Fellowship by the OpEd Project, a US initiative to place underrepresented experts (especially women) in thought-leadership positions, and is an alum ambassador for the project’s online programme. She has written for the Huffington Post, Wired, the Conversation, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times and her opinions are often quoted by journalists. She has given over 200 invited lectures at conferences, seminars, symposia and international courses.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Oxford University Press Delivery: Spring 2022 Publication: Autumn 2022 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 60,000–70,000 words

All rights available excluding World English Language (Oxford University Press)