Task: Fact Verification
Input (English): Paragraph: The article doesn’t discuss what the study authors new “way” of assessment might add in the way of costs. The story didn’t provide any data to give a sense of the potential benefit of the new approach. No numbers were given to explain how well it worked. Because there is so little information about the imaging technique and what it requires, it’s hard to say what the harms or benefits might be, but certainly the story might have mentioned the potential risk of drug intervention (or non-intervention) if the inflammatory cell “marker” is valid as a predictor of heart attack risk. Also, it would have been worth discussing if the new imaging technique exposes patients to radiation, which has been shown to increase the risk of cancer if used repeatedly. The story does not adequately establish the quality of the evidence, except to indicate that more research is needed, implying that this is preliminary work. From the journal article itself:  “The main limitation of this study is the lack of data demonstrating a predictive value of these imaging markers for clinical outcomes, which falls beyond the scope of this current work.” There was no such caveat in the news story. Rather, the headline trumpets that it “May Predict Heart Attacks.” No disease mongering here. The story stated that “about 750,000 Americans have a heart attack every year.” The article appears to quote only those who conducted the study. The article does describe current means of assessing heart attack risk, as well as some interventions (surgical and medical) to address those risks. However, the article doesn’t mention how this new technique would stack up against standard tests like stress tests or nuclear perfusion scans. There also is the option of simply treating people with risk factors and not utilizing imaging tests. The story explains that more research is needed before the technology might be available to everyone. The story focuses on the use of inflammatory heart tissue as having potentially better predictive value than current risk assessment tools for heart attack. But it’s a reluctant satisfactory, because the narrative is confusing and no numbers were given to estimate the scope of the potential benefit–how well the new approach worked. We could not locate a release from the University of Oxford or Science Translational Medicine. Claim: New Heart Imaging Method May Predict Heart Attack
Output (English): 0