Brain Health Blog

In the past couple months of maintaining the Brain Health Blog, I’ve been surprised at how frequently the press release for a scientific finding has little to do with the research that was done. Maybe the cynical among you already figured as much, but it struck me as a bit disconcerting.

For example, I read this press release about a cancer-fighting drug that enhances memory, and thought it would be interesting to cover here. The subtitle:

“U.S. scientists have demonstrated for the first time a cancer-fighting drug might also enhance long-term memory and strengthen neural connections.”

When I found the original paper by Vecsey et al., however, I realized that this was not the scientists’ finding at all.

In fact, in the opening paragraphs Vecsey cites at least four prior experiments by different labs that had already demonstrated that this drug enhanced memory and neural connections. This background motivated Vecsey’s hypotheses, but was not the result of this paper.

Now to be fair, Vecsey’s group probably wasn’t responsible for the press release. This is usually handled by someone at the university who is broadly familiar with science, but who is not an expert of the field and must find a way to make a gene expression regulation study sexy.

What they did find was interesting in its own right, but perhaps harder to make glamorous in a few sentences. (Doubts aside, I’ll try anyways…) It was previously established that histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors can enhance memory and synaptic plasticity. Vecsey et al. made significant headway into understanding how this happens. They identified molecular mechanisms that are integral to HDAC inhibitors leading to improved memory. If we can understand how HDAC inhibitors affect memory and neuroplasticity, we’ll be better able to create a drug that can potentially be used to address neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Ok, so maybe I haven’t succeeded in communicating that their results are exciting, but the point is that press releases sometimes do not reflect the research. In a good case we as readers end up more skeptical about what a release is telling us, and in a worse scenario we accumulate lots of misinformation and false attribution.