text_1: Eating more fish could prevent Parkinson's disease
text_2: The subtitle of this news release says the Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) study “shines more light on the link between consumption of fish and better long-term neurologic health.” But this in vitro lab study only suggests that the fish protein, parvalbumin, binds to a particular human protein called “alpha-synuclein” which has been identified as forming amyloid chains in patients with Parkinson’s disease. The news release should have made it clear that studies of fish cannot be extrapolated to humans, and further, that no cause and effect relationship has been established between amyloid proteins and the development of any neurologic disease. Any news release touching on Parkinson’s disease — or any other of the neurodegenerative disorders that have no cure — is likely to draw a lot of attention from news organizations. Parkinson’s disease alone affects about 1 million Americans and 10 million people worldwide. Although this news release clearly states the disease has no cure, it is riddled with language that implies fish consumption inhibits amyloid formation and that amyloid formation “can be responsible for various diseases,” but that’s an unproven theory and not even addressed by this study. Our concern is that this framing will be adopted by unskeptical reporters and the cause and effect language will be erroneously adopted despite absolutely no evidence to support it.