STEVEN E WOLOSHIN

..To understand better how women perceive the chance of getting breast cancer, the authors asked women to estimate the risk in several ways. Each woman's answer was related to her actual risk...

..Perceptions of drug effectiveness were much lower for ads that incorporated the benefit box than for ads that did not. Most people we interviewed want benefit data in drug ads, can understand these data, and are influenced by them...

..People are increasingly presented with medical statistics. There are no existing measures to assess their level of interest or confidence in using medical statistics...

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..There is growing interest in using C-reactive protein (CRP) levels to help select patients for lipid lowering therapy--although this practice is not yet supported by evidence of benefit in a randomized trial...

..The fractious public debate over mammography screening recommendations for women aged 40 to 49 years has received extensive attention in medical journals and in the press...

..g., time frame), how to put disease risk and treatment benefit in context (e.g., evaluating competing risks), how to interpret changes in risk, and whether to believe the statements about changes in risk...

..To examine media stories on research presented at scientific meetings to see if they reported basic study facts and cautions, and whether they were clear about the preliminary stage of the research...

..At least one-fourth of respondents who had seen or heard a celebrity endorsement said that the endorsement made them more likely to undergo mammography (25%), PSA testing (31%), or sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy (37%)...

..To establish the reliability/validity of an 18-item test of patients' medical data interpretation skills...

..5 ng/mL. We examined the effect of this lower threshold on the number of American men who would be labeled abnormal by a single PSA test...

..To describe changes in skin biopsy rates and to determine their relation with changes in the incidence of melanoma...

..Unfortunately, this fundamental information is not readily available to patients or physicians. We created simple one-page charts that present the 10-year chance of dying from various causes according to age, sex, and smoking status...

..We aimed to characterize advertising by the nation's top academic medical centers...

..If practice were evidence-based, PSA screening would be less common among men than colorectal cancer screening, a preventive service of broad acceptance and proven efficacy...

..In spite of the increased attention to pain treatment, there has not been an increase in office visits for musculoskeletal pain complaints. The threshold for prescribing NSAIDS and opioids, however, has dropped...

..A comprehensive assessment instrument that measures the burden of both symptoms and treatment is needed to determine the optimal management of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and we developed such an instrument...

..We sought to describe the attitudes of women in the United States toward less intense screening, specifically, less frequent screening and eventual cessation of screening...

..This enthusiasm creates an environment ripe for the premature diffusion of technologies such as total-body computed tomographic scanning, placing the public at risk of overtesting and overtreatment...

..Requiring ads to include a table with data on drug benefits and side effects (derived from clinical trials) could help, provided that consumers understand such tabular information...

..Efforts are under way to distribute hospital performance data directly to patients to inform their decisions about where to go for major surgery, but patients are not always involved in making the decision of where they will have surgery...

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..We sought to describe news coverage of abstracts, characterize the research, and determine subsequent full publication in the medical literature...

..Although many studies document problems with understanding risk information, few assess ways to teach interpretation skills...

..CONCLUSIONS: Press releases do not routinely highlight study limitations or the role of industry funding. Data are often presented using formats that may exaggerate the perceived importance of findings...

..The news media are often criticized for exaggerated coverage of weak science. Press releases, a source of information for many journalists, might be a source of those exaggerations...

..We assessed the US public's understanding of the meaning of FDA drug approval and tested how brief explanations communicating drug uncertainties affect consumer choices...

..Unnecessary exposure to medical interventions can harm patients. Many hope that generalist physicians can limit such unnecessary exposure...

..To learn how patients in Medicare, the US medical insurance programme that covers elderly patients, made decisions about where to undergo major surgery and how they would make future decisions...

..0, 2.1 to 4.3). CONCLUSION: Absolute risks are often not easily accessible in articles reporting ratio measures and sometimes are missing altogether-this lack of accessibility can easily exaggerate readers' perceptions of benefit or harm...