text_1: New drug ‘may turn back the clock on heart disease’
text_2: This was an overly enthusiastic account of a study on an experimental new drug called anacetrapib that lowers bad cholesterol and raises good cholesterol. The study was designed to look primarily at the safety of the drug and not whether it prevented heart attacks. But that didn’t prevent the story from making some wildly positive statements about the likely benefits of treatment. The story stumbles out of the gate with an over-the-top prediction about how the drug “may conquer heart disease.”  It continues to lay on the hype with quotes about the “incredible” results and how the drug could be “the perfect new treatment for all people at risk of a heart attack.” We realize some of this enthusiasm came from the mouths of experts but we know there are many who would be far more cautious and we didn’t hear from them in the story. It closes with an erroneous description of how many people died in the study. Needless to say, not what we hope to see on the front page of the nation’s highest-circulating daily. By comparison, look at how NPR closed their online story: “Still there were four deaths from cardiovascular causes among the 800 patients taking Merck’s drug compared with just one among the same number in the the just-released trial results. So don’t count Merck’s drug approved just yet.” (Please note: we reviewed the first version of each story that we found – not any subsequent versions the news orgs may have published. In fact, the version we reviewed doesn’t even appear online anymore.) It would nice if preventing heart attacks was just a matter of lowering bad cholesterol and raising good cholesterol. However, research increasingly suggests that it isn’t as simple as that. Drugs that lower bad cholesterol through one mechanism do appear to be effective, but drugs that lower it another way may not offer the same protection. Similarly, people with naturally high good cholesterol seem to have a low risk of heart attacks, but not every drug that raises good cholesterol has cardiovacular benefits. (In fact, another experimental drug that raises good cholesterol was shown recently to increase the risk of heart attacks.) So far, the drug discussed in this story doesn’t appear to have the same problems as its good cholesterol-raising predecessor, but at this early stage of development we simply don’t know if it works. Larger studies might show that the drug has safety problems that haven’t shown up in this study. Or it might turn out that the drug is safe but doesn’t offer much protection. Some drugs even get approved only to later be recalled because of rare but serious adverse effects that aren’t apparent until millions of people start taking the medicine. This is all a way of saying that caution is required when a drug is this early in its development. There are any number of ways that it could get derailed prior to reaching the market, and so journalists have to take care not get too caught up in the excitement.