Miracle or hype? News reports often inflate cancer drugs' success

Breakthrough. Game changer. Miracle drug.

The media often use terms like these when reporting on new cancer drugs, even when the drugs are unproved, according to a report published online Thursday in JAMA Oncology.

Researchers searched news stories on Google for the words "cancer drug" and over-the-top terms such as "home run," "groundbreaking" and "marvel." They found 94 news stories from 66 outlets published from June 21 to June 25  after the conclusion of a major cancer conference. News sources ranged from leading newspapers and TV stations to small trade publications.

While some new immune therapies put a fraction of patients into long-term remission, none have been proved to definitively cure patients, study co-author Vinay Prasad said.

Most new cancer drugs extend survival by only a few months, said Prasad, an assistant professor at the Knight Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University.

Hyping new cancer drugs "feeds into this mentality the newest thing has got to be the best thing," Prasad said. While newer often means better when it comes to cellphones or computers, that's not necessarily the case with cancer drugs. Prasad said the hard reality of cancer is that, for many tumors, "our treatments are just not that great yet."

Half of the drugs in the news reports he studied hadn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which requires manufacturers to provide evidence that treatments are safe and effective. In 14% of stories, the drugs being praised hadn't yet been tested on humans.

"It's always inappropriate to say that something is a 'breakthrough' or 'game changer' based on work in animals," Prasad said. "It would be like doing a news story about someone who's bought a lottery ticket, talking about how much money he plans to win."

Media hype came from a variety of sources.

More than half of the excessive praise came from journalists themselves, while 27% came from doctors; 9% from health experts; 8% from patients; and 1% from a member of Congress, researchers found.

If cancer researchers "start patting ourselves on the back and hailing every small, marginal drug as a game changer, it will take away some of our motivation to do better," Prasad said. "We should set the bar high and really earn it and try to find a drug that is truly great. That's what our patients expect."

Hyping new therapies can mislead patients, giving them false hope that new treatments will save their lives, said Tim Turnham, executive director of the Melanoma Research Foundation, who wasn't involved in the new study.

With so many superlatives — and so little context — "it's difficult for patients to parse out what’s new and exciting and what's not likely to help them very much," Turnham said.

The new study leaves some key questions unanswered, said Lisa Schwartz, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire.

Researchers focused only on news stories about cancer drugs that contained 10 key words; they didn't look at cancer stories without these terms. So it's impossible to know whether sensationalist reporting on cancer accounts for a majority of coverage or just a fraction, said Schwartz, whose research focuses on communicating health news to the public.

Still, few doubt that the hype exists.

The National Institutes of Health was criticized last month when it put out a press release celebrating a "landmark study" on high blood pressure that had not yet been peer-reviewed. Many physicians said they were frustrated that the press release — which claimed to offer "life-saving" information to patients — was short on meaningful details.

The hype around new treatments — most of which carry high price tags — often starts with the marketing juggernaut that accompanies medical conferences, said Karl Stark, president of the board of the Association of Health Care Journalists, who oversees health coverage at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

While medical journals have strict standards about what researchers can claim, drug makers have no obligation to follow these rules when writing press releases. "It's the Wild West in these press releases," said Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, which evaluates medical coverage and press releases. Many inflate drugs' benefits but spend little to no time on side effects.

Virtually everyone touched by the health care industry has an incentive to hype medical progress, Turnham said. Scientists and universities, which face stiff competition for research grants, benefit from the publicity. Journalists face pressure to sensationalize stories to boost their ratings or Web traffic, Turnham said.

Few journalists have formal medical training. Figuring out which claims are too good to be true is a skill that typically takes years to hone.

Reporters today face greater pressures than ever before, Schwitzer said. Media organizations have spent years shrinking their staffs, while asking remaining employees to do more with less.

For its part, the health journalist association tries to raise the quality of medical coverage, both through educational sessions as well as online newsletters, Stark said. Schwitzer regularly teaches workshops at these conferences. Schwitzer listed "seven words you shouldn't use in medical news" — including three singled out by the authors of the new study — in a blog post originally published in 2000.

"Hype causes harm," Schwitzer wrote in a post Thursday . "Let the evidence speak for itself. Good evidence doesn't need the sugar coating."