In this issue...
Russ Swan, editor, writes...
Among the unresolved scientific issues that are likely to gain coverage in the less scientifically diligent newspapers, right up there with the Loch Ness Monster and extraterrestrials is the age-old (and age-related) question of andropause, better known as the male menopause. Depending on which papers you read, and which you believe, this is either a clinically proven fact or nothing more than a fancy name for middle-agedness.
A report this week does nothing to reduce this confusion. Published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, the research by scientists at Manchester University, Imperial College, and University College London has been cited as proof of both the existence and the non-existence of the male menopause. An excellent critique from the Knight Science Journalism Tracker at MIT highlights this discrepancy, but has itself failed to fully appreciate the often-uneasy relationship between science and the press. Unhelpfully, it also draws its own conclusions about the research, coming down firmly against the existence of this elusive syndrome.
The MIT science journalism tracker sets out to be, in its own words, 'peer review within science journalism'. Regular readers will appreciate that this is something I am going to approve of. But there is an element here of 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' (who will guard us from the guards?), a question apparently asked of Socrates by Plato. For while the journalism tracker rightly points out that many news outlets have drawn conclusions that this paper has 'found' the andropause, it is quite wrong to suggest that they did this only by twisting the facts of the published paper.
The research found evidence of a correlation between hormone deficiency and menopause symptoms, which by itself will not surprise many Laboratorytalk readers. What was poorly reported in the media was that this only affected about two per cent of the subjects. Depending on your point of view (or your prejudices), this could be presented as either confirming or denying the phenomenon - and that's exactly what happened. But the MIT Knight Science journalism tracker missed a trick when it states loftily that one 'shouldn't name it andropause or male menopause - and the scientists themselves did NOT use the term in the whole article'.
Because this is where we get to the heart of the matter. The researchers may not have used those phrases in their NEJM paper, but their PR people most certainly did. Last week a press release dropped into my inbox entitled 'Researchers unzip symptoms of the male menopause'. Unzip - har har. Do you see what they did there? It can hardly be a surprise that news outlets around the globe saw this gift horse and elected not to stare too closely into its mouth.
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