Andrew Hyde's blog

Last week we had the interesting experience of watching how a PLoS Medicine meta-analysis of anti-depressant drug trials generated a furore in the media. It featured on the front page of four UK national newspapers (the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent and the Times), was the leading item on the BBC News and prompted stories in Time, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist.

The paper not only posed questions about the benefits of antidepressants, it revealed how many clinical trial results do not see the light of day. But whilst the issues relating to it continue to be debated – a discussion leads the Guardian Science Weekly Podcast this week– some of the headlines in the media maelstrom misrepresented the study.

Are the staggering amounts spent by drug companies on marketing justified by their innovation in drug development? Not according to a Policy Forum in PLoS Medicine which stimulated a great deal of debate across blogs and news sites over the past couple of weeks.

Following the recent blog that related a PLoS paper to end of year excess, this week a PLoS Medicine study evaluating the combined impact of four healthy forms of behaviour was devoured by journalists keen to remind us to stick to New Year resolutions. This was certainly the approach of the New Scientist who let their readers know that no matter how “fat or unhealthy you already are” the conclusions of the study by Kay-Tee Khaw and colleagues are important. Conducted amongst 20,000 participants in the UK, the study found that those who are non-smokers, take exercise, have a moderate alcohol intake and eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day live on average an additional fourteen years of life compared with people who adopt none of these behaviours.

Sheri Weiser, corresponding author of a study in PLoS Medicine on the link between food insecurity and high risk sexual behaviour, featured in the PLoS collection on poverty, has been interviewed by the Kaiser Family Foundation about her research.

The interview provides an excellent overview of the study, which concludes that for women in Botswana and Swaziland food insecurity is strongly associated with the likelihood of engaging in unprotected sex, the exchange of sex for food or other resources, and lack of control in their sexual relations.

The PLoS Medicine Editors, in the editorial for August 2007, focus on the role of qualitative methods in medical research. (We were promoted to write it having recently published another qualitative paper.) Our understanding is that it is now generally recognised that such methods do have an important role to play. Or have we got it all wrong; is there still a reluctance to accept that anything useful can be learned from research without numbers?