NEW YORK, Jul 27 (Reuters Health) - Adopting a healthy lifestyle by
exercising, eating a well-balanced diet and not smoking can improve health and
prevent disease, but articles about preventive medicine rarely appear in major
US medical journals, researchers report.
A review in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine for August looked at
articles that were published in 1998 in the Journal of the American Medical
Association and The New England Journal of Medicine. Just 2% of articles focused
on the importance of a healthy lifestyle, according to the report.
"The journals may not be giving as much emphasis to prevention as the topic
deserves," lead author Dr. Steven H. Woolf, of the Medical College of Virginia
in Richmond, told Reuters Health.
Since much of the health news in the United States comes from studies
published in these two major journals, ordinary people may be missing out on the
prevention message, according to Woolf.
"They may get a sense that it's not terribly important," he said.
In their review of one year's worth of issues of the two journals, Woolf and
a colleague, Dr. Robert E. Johnson, found that just 9% of articles focused on
preventing or screening for disease.
And these articles often focus on topics that do not affect most people,
such as the prevention of uncommon infections, the authors report. Only three
articles discussed ways to improve the way vaccinations are given, for example.
While the two journals published 32 articles on treating HIV, the virus that
causes AIDS, they published only four dealing with ways to prevent the spread of
sexually transmitted diseases.
And not a single article published in 1998 aimed to help physicians stop
kids from smoking.
The researchers did not investigate the reasons that prevention rarely makes
the cut in major journals, but Woolf listed a few possibilities in his comments
to Reuters Health.
The scarcity of prevention articles may reflect a lack of research into
prevention topics, according to Woolf. "No one is going to make millions of
bucks by getting people to exercise," so corporate funding for preventive
research may be hard to get, he said.
However, he pointed out that there are many prevention articles published in
other medical journals, including ones that focus on preventive medicine.
Journal editors may also filter out articles that they think will not be of
interest to their readers, Woolf noted. "It's not newsworthy to say that smoking
is still bad for the health," he said.
Woolf cautioned that this study is not the final word on the subject, since
it only included one year's worth of articles in two journals. He hopes to
continue tracking articles for several years, although he said he suspects that
the findings will not change.
In addition, Woolf's team is currently reviewing health stories on
television evening news broadcasts to see what sort of messages are reaching the
public.
