WTF is wrong with the media in the UK?

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alz-brain-scan_origSome potentially exciting news has been announced and the UK media are all over it …

The Telegraph …

Breakthrough as scientists create first drug to halt Alzheimer’s disease

A pill taken twice a day has stalled deterioration of the brain in Alzheimer’s patients for the first time.

Scientists announced that the mental decline of participants in a final-stage trial had been halted for 18 months, raising hopes that an effective treatment for the drug, called LMTX, is close at hand.

New Scientist …

Unprecedented Alzheimer’s drug slows disease by 80 per cent

“Our results are unprecendented, compared with anyone else’s,” says Claude Wischik  at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and co-founder of the firm TauRx Pharmaceuticals, which developed LMTX.

 

Many others including The Times and also the BBC are carrying a similar story and so the message to the UK public is that a new dramatic discovery has been made.

Ever so slight flaw … its all rather sadly complete bollocks and none of them appears to have fact-checked.

The Skeptical Bit

The problem with the above stories doing the rounds in the UK media about the new LMTX wonder-drug is that LMTX has failed its clinical trials and does not actually work.

Interestingly enough the US media got it right. The New York Times reports …

Alzheimer’s Drug LMTX Falters in Final Stage of Trials

A new type of drug for Alzheimer’s disease failed to slow the rate of decline in mental ability and daily functioning in its first large clinical trial. There was a hint, though, that it might be effective for certain patients.

…Over all, the patients who received LMTX, which was developed by TauRx Therapeutics, did not have a slower rate of decline in mental ability or daily functioning than those in the control group.

… Dr. Rachelle Doody, director of the Alzheimer’s disease and Memory Disorders Center at Baylor College of Medicine, agreed. “To present it to the public now as a promising approach seems unjustified,” she said.

Luckily some have been having a go at the media about this …

(Side note: RCT = Randomised Clinical Trial)

Dr Ben Goldacre tweets to Chris Smyth about his front page article within The Times claiming it to be a new breakthrough …

Forbes earns the Gold star – they really got this right

Matthew Herper, the Forbes Science and Medicine writer, did not permit the wool to be pulled over his eyes. He did not take the TauRx press release at face value. Instead he looked and found that their claim was nonsense and that the trail had failed …

The study failed, with patients on LMTX faring no better than those on placebo, but TauRX may use the data to try to get its medicine approved anyway.

The company says that in 15% of the patients in the study who did not receive other Alzheimer’s drugs — the standard of care in most Western nations — there was a dramatic benefit, with MRI’s of the patients’ brains showing less brain atrophy. TauRx and the outside scientists running its study argue that the drug may have a role in slowing Alzhimer’s progress before existing drugs, which treat symptoms, are used. The data are being presented this morning at the annual meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association.

Outside researchers are skeptical.

“I’ve been involved in clinical trials for 30 years and one of the things I’ve ben taught and that has been drilled into me is that the only thing that ultimately counts is the primary analysis,” says David Knoppman, a professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic. “And the primary analysis here was negative.” He adds: “Our field is littered with secondary analyses that when followed up failed to materialize.”

In Summary

The BBC, New Scientist, The Times and other UK media outlets are all simply parroting the press-release and so are reporting a failed trial as a success, and the rest of the world is reporting the failed trail as failed.

You can see this if you google news for LMTX … there is a growing pool of UK media outlets all copying each other with the positive claim, and everybody else on the planet reporting what actually happened – link lmtx

WTF is wrong with you UK media?

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