Trial reportBMC medicine2019
Claims of causality in health news: a randomised trial.
Trial report in BMC medicine, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Reporting bias is prevalent in systematic reviews and meta-analyses related to endoscopicJournal of spine surgery (Hong Kong) · 2025Article
- Effective communications strategies to increase the impact of environmental health research.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2023Article
- Changes in health communication in the age of COVID-19: A study on the dissemination of preprints to the public.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Causal and Associational Language in Observational Health Research: A Systematic Evaluation.American journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- 2020 vision? A retrospective study of time-bound curative claims in British and Irish newspapers.The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2022Article
- Causal theory error in college students' understanding of science studies.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- Article
- Misinformation in and about science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Review
- Article
- Risk messages relating to fertility and pregnancy: a media content analysis.Wellcome open research · 2021Article
- Shadowcasting tourism knowledge through media: Self-driving sex cars?Annals of tourism research · 2020Article
- Defining and detecting fake news in health and medicine reporting.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2020Article
- Causal overstatements reduced in press releases following academic study of health news.Wellcome open research · 2020Article
- Clinical impact of high-profile animal-based research reported in the UK national press.BMJ open science · 2020Article
- Communicating science: epigenetics in the spotlight.Environmental epigenetics · 2020Review
- The association between exaggeration in health-related science news and academic press releases: a replication study.Wellcome open research · 2019Article
- Discordance in causal terminology between scientific papers and subsequent press releases: chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the "age of spin".Frontiers in neurologyArticle
- Avoidance of causality outside experiments: Hypotheses from cognitive dissonance reduction.Science progressArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMisleading news claims can be detrimental to public health. We aimed to improve the alignment between causal claims and evidence, without losing news interest (counter to assumptions that news is not interested in communicating caution).
methodsWe tested two interventions in press releases, which are the main sources for science and health news: (a) aligning the headlines and main causal claims with the underlying evidence (strong for experimental, cautious for correlational) and (b) inserting explicit statements/caveats about inferring causality. The 'participants' were press releases on health-related topics (N = 312; control = 89, claim alignment = 64, causality statement = 79, both = 80) from nine press offices (journals, universities, funders). Outcomes were news content (headlines, causal claims, caveats) in English-language international and national media (newspapers, websites, broadcast; N = 2257), news uptake (% press releases gaining news coverage) and feasibility (% press releases implementing cautious statements).
resultsNews headlines showed better alignment to evidence when press releases were aligned (intention-to-treat analysis (ITT) 56% vs 52%, OR = 1.2 to 1.9; as-treated analysis (AT) 60% vs 32%, OR = 1.3 to 4.4). News claims also followed press releases, significant only for AT (ITT 62% vs 60%, OR = 0.7 to 1.6; AT, 67% vs 39%, OR = 1.4 to 5.7). The same was true for causality statements/caveats (ITT 15% vs 10%, OR = 0.9 to 2.6; AT 20% vs 0%, OR 16 to 156). There was no evidence of lost news uptake for press releases with aligned headlines and claims (ITT 55% vs 55%, OR = 0.7 to 1.3, AT 58% vs 60%, OR = 0.7 to 1.7), or causality statements/caveats (ITT 53% vs 56%, OR = 0.8 to 1.0, AT 66% vs 52%, OR = 1.3 to 2.7). Feasibility was demonstrated by a spontaneous increase in cautious headlines, claims and caveats in press releases compared to the pre-trial period (OR = 1.01 to 2.6, 1.3 to 3.4, 1.1 to 26, respectively).
conclusionsNews claims-even headlines-can become better aligned with evidence. Cautious claims and explicit caveats about correlational findings may penetrate into news without harming news interest. Findings from AT analysis are correlational and may not imply cause, although here the linking mechanism between press releases and news is known. ITT analysis was insensitive due to spontaneous adoption of interventions across conditions.
trial registrationISRCTN10492618 (20 August 2015).
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.