Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
The Paper Touting Benefits Of Mediterranean Diet Was Just Retracted. But That Doesn't Mean It Was Wrong.
The New York Times: That Huge Mediterranean Diet Study Was Flawed. But Was It Wrong?
The study was a landmark, one of the few attempts to rigorously evaluate a particular diet. And the results were striking: A Mediterranean diet, with abundant vegetables and fruit, can slash the risk of heart attacks and strokes. But now that trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013, has come under fire. The authors retracted their original paper on Wednesday and published an unusual “re-analysis” of their data in the same journal. (Kolata, 6/13)
NPR: New England Journal Of Medicine Retracts And Replaces Mediterranean Diet Study
The revised paper says only that people eating the Mediterranean diet had fewer strokes and heart attacks, not, as the original paper claimed, that the diet was the direct cause of those health benefits. Of course, a change in one paper — even a high-profile one — doesn't mean that researchers have lost faith in the benefits of the Mediterranean diet. "I don't know anybody who would turn around from this and say, 'Now that this has been revealed, we should all eat cotton candy and turn away from the Mediterranean diet,' " says David Allison, dean of the School of Public Health at Indiana University in Bloomington. (McCook, 6/13)
The Associated Press: Science Says: What Happens When Researchers Make Mistakes
A top medical journal is correcting five studies and republishing a sixth after a British doctor scrutinized thousands of reports in eight journals over more than a decade and questioned some of their methods. The editor of the New England Journal of Medicine says no conclusions changed, and that the corrections it published Wednesday should raise public trust in science, not erode it. (Marchione, 6/13)
