medical research – Page 3 – Gene's Medical Notes

Women and favoured sleep positions

If you’ve ever woken up in the morning to stiffness in a particular side you would probably arrive at the conclusion that you had spent much of that night lying in that position. That discomfort may have arisen from the weight of your body pressed against that side for a prolonged period.

An incorrect – or to be more specific – uncomfortable sleeping position can raise your blood pressure through the night and consequently bring along some of the other risks associated with raised blood pressure if repeated for a prolonged period.

If the pressure of your own body pressed against your side in a night causes that level of discomfort in the morning, imagine what would happen if you were a pregnant woman bearing the weight of a baby?

We have already examined in the previous post how common themes around daily life such as diet, exercise, medicine and mental health are often researched and investigated and thoroughly mined for slants and angles as part of a media strategy of generating column inches from pre-existing information and common knowledge.

So it is no surprise, hence, to see yet another article in the media dispensing advice on sleep.

The Mail Online advises women not to sleep on your back in the last trimester as it could cause stillbirth. Backed of course, by experts.

Remember the line of thinking mentioned in the previous post?

A shark is a fish. A whale is a fish. With time, sharks can become whales, according to experts.

This is how the media works.

The Mail Online seems to have done exactly that. Perhaps sensationalising the headline first, then teasing the reader along the way by purporting to reveal the organisation and result of a blitz of information at the end. Except that after reading the article, you’ve probably thought it flowed well, but didn’t really reveal any insight.

The study – who financed it? – examined the sleep positions of twenty-nine women in their final trimester and the effects these had on their baby’s behaviour.

The overall result was that all babies were born healthy. On that basis there was no significant impact on sleeping positions on baby development. Remember the attention grabbing headline? It seemingly amounted to nothing in the end.

The tenuous link used in the research was that when women slept on their right side, babies were slightly more likely to be active and awake, and if mothers slept on their backs, babies were more likely to be quietly asleep.

The research was carried out by researchers in New Zealand and involved placing ECG monitors on mothers in the third trimester.

Despite the non-entity of significant results, sleeping on your back for a pregnant mother may compress major blood vessels and this may change the baby’s heart rate.

But don’t role out the possibility that in years to come, the media may use this piece of research to bulk up an article fronted by the headline “Sleeping on your back gives you calmer babies”, using the tenuous link that the blood flow and pressure of stressed, tense pregnant women to the baby was reduced when they slept on their backs.

There are 7 billion in this planet and using a study sample size of twenty nine women is also ridiculously small. If 1 of those women had experienced complications then the headline might have been “3% of all foetuses at risk”!

Just sleep in a comfortable position. And get lots of sleep. And go see your GP for advice instead of seeking health advice from a newspaper.

You know how media spin works.

What your breakfast reveals about media companies

Wordsmiths would tell you that the origins of the word “breakfast” lie in the words “break” and “fast”. Then again, you wouldn’t actually need an expert to tell you the combined word comes from its intention – to end the fasting period. What fast? Presumably in Roman days the fast represented the period from after sunset to sunrise, where people had to endure going without food in the cold of night, at a time when the thinking was “Eat as much as you can during the day, while you can”. The line of thinking about what to eat for breakfast certainly does vary from place to place. Some believe that after a period of doing without food – okay, so a few hours every evening now after a “Just Eat” gorge of Indian takeaway washed down with bottles of Kingfisher can hardly be called a fast anymore – the body has to stock up on its resources. Enter the full English breakfast; sausages, bacon, eggs, tomatoes, beans (mustn’t forget your greens), black pudding – everything you wanted to eat during the day, presented to you literally on a plate, in case you miss the opportunity to eat later on. In contrast, there are others of the thinking that after an overnight period of doing without, the body cannot be forced into what is a gorge. Just as someone who is parched and dehydrated has to resist the natural urge to guzzle down water when presented with it, breakfast, some think, is only a primer for a heavy lunch. Hence the idea of a light continental croissant, a little way of appeasing the hungry body but regulating the intake of food so the body is not lulled into a yo-yo pattern of starvation and gorging that is more typical of eating disorders.

Makes sense? Both points of view actually do, despite the conflicts about whether or not to eat heavy first thing in the morning. But to further complicate the issue, a third group believes that since your body, when at rest, will require resources to draw on when you are asleep, then it makes perfect sense to load up with a heavy meal as the last meal of the day. Start light, finish heavy. Viewed in the context, it makes sense too.

If there is any one consistent factor about diet, it is probably that the debate, ideas and media reports will continue into the future, and ideas will come and go and come back again. The fad for various diets has sold books and filled magazine columns and given the media lots to write about, which is great for the industry because media is not a sector that relies on bringing to you information that is necessarily correct, it is a sector that relies on attracting readership and human traffic in order to build up a reader base which it leverages to companies to sell advertising. Advertising is what drives media, not the exposition or exploration of facts. Hence media companies will present information that they feel is of interest and will hook in readers. It doesn’t necessarily have to be substantiated, as long as there is a fellow source to mention, as if the validation of facts had been corroborated by them.

Where do research scientists fit in this grand scheme of things? There are various kinds of research scientists, ones that truly explore the world in order to further it, and others who conduct investigation in order that it may be latched on to by the media in reports. Ultimately it comes down to who is funding the work. Funded by a company such as Cancer Research? The investigative research conducted by such research scientists is likely to be subject to stringer validation. Funded by a pharmaceutical company? The data obtained by such research needs to be handled carefully in order that the outcomes are not flawed or biased towards any products the company is producing.

In other words, if a pharmaceutical company is working on producing a medical product that is, for example, has seaweed as an active ingredient, then the research must not be conducted in a way that only shows the positive benefits of seaweed; research that only gives supposed scientific validation to a pre-determined result.

Bias is all too easy to spot when the links are direct, when a pharmaceutical company employs scientists. But what happens when the grand paymaster is the media company?

Hang on, I hear you say. Why would a media company, perhaps a newspaper, employ a group of scientists? And how could they get away with it?

The end product for a pharmaceutical company is a medical one. The end product for a newspaper is news, and the research scientists are there to provide it.

The group of scientists don’t necessarily need to be under permanent employ, just occasional contract work when there are lull periods in the news. And the work that they do is not necessarily related to what is in the article that is published anyway. Tenuous links are exploited to maximise the draw of a headline.

This is how it works:

A shark is a fish. A whale is a fish. Your newspaper reports that there is the possibility that sharks could become whales.

And that’s it.

A media company – newspaper, magazine, channel, web agency – can hire research scientists to lend credibility to semi-extravagant claims.

As long as there is another attributable source, or somewhere to dismiss the evidence – easily done by mentioning “It is generally accepted that …” or “Common convention holds that …” before launching into the juicy bit – the bit that spins things out, through a long process by which the receiver, either reader or viewer, has hopefully forgotten what the gist of the argument was in the first place – everything can passed off. In fact, it is a psychological trick – the receiver keeps following in the hope of being able mentally ordering the great influx of information.

Ever watched a BBC drama series? After six episodes, numerous disjointed flashbacks, the final episode always seems a bit of a letdown because you realise everything was obvious and the in-betweens were just filler bits to spin things out.

I digress. But returning to the point, media companies can hire research scientists on an occasional basis. Some may even do so, and have a scientist for full time hire as a generator of scientific news.

A direct link between a media agency and a research scientist may sound implausible. But think of the UK’s Channel 4 programme, Embarrassing Bodies, where a team of four doctors go around examining people, dispensing advice, running health experiments in a format of an hour-long slot punctuated by two minutes of advertisements for every thirteen minutes of the programme.

If the media company does not want its links to be so obvious, it can dilute them progressively through the form of intermediary companies.

For example, ABC newspaper hires DEF company to manage its search engine optimisation campaign. DEF hires GHI creative media, who hire JKL, a freelance journalist who knows Dr MNO, who conducts research for hire. Eventually MNO’s “research” ends up in the ABC newspaper. If it proves to be highly controversial or toxic to some extent, ABC’s links to MNO are very, very easy to disavow.

So when the media recently reported that scientists say skipping the morning meal could be linked to poorer cardiovascular health, should we pay any heed to it?

The research findings revealed that, compared with those who had an energy-dense breakfast, those who missed the meal had a greater extent of the early stages of atherosclerosis – a buildup of fatty material inside the arteries.

But the link been skipping breakfast and cardiovascular health is tenuous at best, as the articles themselves admit.

“People who skip breakfast, not only do they eat late and in an odd fashion, but [they also] have a poor lifestyle,” said Valentin Fuster, co-author of the research and director of Mount Sinai Heart in New York and the Madrid-based cardiovascular research institute, the CNIC.

So a poorer lifestyle gives negative impact to your health. A poorer lifestyle causes you to miss breakfast. Sharks do become whales.

This supposed link between skipping breakfast and cardiovascular health was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and the research had partly been funded by the Spanish bank Santander. The health and diets of 4,052 middle-aged bank workers, both men and women, with no previous history of cardiovascular disease were compared.

You can bet that on another day where news is slow, someone will roll out an “Eating breakfast on the move harms your health” headline. Nothing to do with the way you move and eat, it is simply because you have a stressful lifestyle that impacts on your health which forces you to eat on the go. But it was a link and headline, a “sell” or bait that drew you in to either purchase a newspaper or magazine, watch a programme, or spend some dwell time on a site.

And that’s how media works.

Revising Traditional Antibiotic Advice

What do you do when you have a cold and feel under the weather? Perhaps you decide to tough it out, and head to work as usual. You grin and bear it, because as far as you are concerned, it’s just a common cold and you can’t do anything about it.

But suppose you don’t get any better after a week, when you expected that the cold would have already run its course. You decide to stay at home to rest, and after a further two days when no improvement is seen, you go to visit the doctor.

The doctor’s advice? A course of antibiotics. Two tablets three times a day after meals, and by the way, keep finishing the course even when you feel better.

This is the advice that has been dispensed through decades to patients. Finish the whole prescription of antibiotics. And as patients, we put our trust in doctors so whatever they said went. Who were we to argue with seven years of medical training?

But what would you say if this medical advice turned out to be incorrect? I know what I’d think – firstly the sceptic in me would say medical advice is fickle and flows with what is fashionable at the time. At times, medicine seems also subservient to politics and economy. Remember the case with red wine? When the economy was flagging, a glass of red wine was said to be good for you. Yet when the NHS was under strain this so-called health benefit was reversed.

In this day and age it is also fashionable for everyone to carve a niche for themselves, and for many the way to do so is to turn traditional advice upside down on its head and revise or reformat existing information. And so, with these in mind, it is unsurprising that we learn of yet another study that claims the rule that patients must finish antibiotics course is wrong.

The new slant on the old problem is that patients should stop taking the prescribed medication when they feel better rather than as what doctors previously used to recommend.

The new panel of experts suggest that the long embedded rule is incorrect, because continually taking medication after we have felt better only lowers the body’s resistance in the long run. They argue that if the body already feels better, giving it medication it does not need has counter-productive effects.

This differs with the advice that doctors have traditionally recommended, which is based on the idea that bacteria remains in our bodies even though we feel better and these bacteria may develop adaptation to antibiotics if they are not fully killed off. In other words, if you have not fully killed off the bacteria, it develops tolerance and immunity to the drug which partially fended it off, and ultimately the antibiotics’ effectiveness is negated.

Imagine two medieval armies: Trojans and Greeks. One day the Trojans manage to get inside the Greek city walls and wreak havoc (according to the Greeks anyway) with their torches, spears and swords. But the Greeks have a special weapon, say for arguments’ sake, an M16 with a laser sight. If the Greeks completely defeat the Trojans, the effectiveness of their weapon is guaranteed against successive waves of Trojan attacks. But if the Greek army stops to celebrate the moment the city battle swings in their favour, retreating Trojans may bring back information about the weapon, and how it works, and plan successive attacks that limit the effectiveness of the weapon or destroy it completely.

Martin Llewelyn, professor in infectious diseases at Brighton and Sussex medical school have called for a re-examination of the traditional advice. In an analysis in the British Medical Journal, they say “the idea that stopping antibiotic treatment early encourages antibiotic resistance is not supported by evidence, while taking antibiotics for longer than necessary increases the risk of resistance”.

In other words, stop taking the medicine the moment you feel better.
In the past, the theory supporting the completion of a course of antibiotics has been that too short a course would allow the bacteria causing disease to mutate and become resistant to the drug.

For certain diseases, bacteria can clearly become resistant if the drugs are not taken for long enough to completely eradicate them. One such example of this is tuberculosis.

But a large majority of the bacteria that cause illnesses are found in the environment around us and have no impact until the bacteria gets into the bloodstream or the gut. The case putting forward a cessation in medication once the patient’s health improves is that the longer the bacterial exposure to antibiotics within the body, the higher the chance of developed resistance.

The hypothesis put forth by Professor Llewelyn has not been without its backers.

Peter Openshaw, president of the British Society for Immunology, said he had always considered the notion that stopping antibiotic treatment early would make organisms more drug-resistant rather “illogical”.

He supported the idea of a more sparing use of antibiotics because the evidence of a link between long-term complete use and benefit was tenuous.

He dismissed claims that not finishing a course of antibiotics would lead to bacteria gaining antibiotic resistance but thought the reverse would be more true. “Far from being irresponsible, shortening the duration of a course of antibiotics might make antibiotic resistance less likely.”

A great British authority, Prof Harold Lambert had made the suggestion as far back as in 1999 in a Lancet article entitled “Don’t keep taking the tablets”. Even though the idea had been broached then, it had not been taken seriously and with hindsight it is surprising that nearly two decades later the medical world has not investigated the alternatives fully and that the optimum duration of antibiotics courses or doses in many conditions remains an investigated fast.

Jodi Lindsay, a professor of microbial pathogenesis at St George’s, University of London, stated that the new research by Professor Llewellyn was good in principle, and that the previous advice to complete a course of antibiotics may have been based on a fear of under-treatment. But nevertheless she cautioned against an over-reaction towards the results of the findings. “The evidence for shorter courses of antibiotics being equal to longer courses, in terms of cure or outcome, is generally good, although more studies would help and there are a few exceptions when longer courses are better – for example, TB.”

To complicate matters, the ideal length of a course of antibiotics varies in individuals depending on what antibiotics they have taken in the past. Hospitalised patients can be tested to find out when the drugs can be stopped. Outside of a hospital setting, this testing is not feasible.

The World Health Organisation advice is still based on the pre-existing guidelines and has not changed.

The Royal College of GPs, however, expressed caution over the findings. “Recommended courses of antibiotics are not random,” said its chair, Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard. She further elaborated that antibiotic treatment courses were already being customised according to individual conditions and if patients took it upon themselves to adjust the prescribed periods, stopping when they felt better, it would be dangerous because a slight turn in outlook did not necessarily demonstrate the complete eradication of the disease. Professor Stokes-Lampard also stressed that it was important for patients to have clear guidelines to adhere to and any adjustment using feel as an indicator might be confusing.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is currently developing guidance for managing common infections, which will look at all available evidence on appropriate prescribing of antibiotics.

The cynics among us might ask, has such a review on current guidelines been made with the objective to cut the cost of medical care? It is well known the health budget is ever dwindling, and one cannot help but feel that the review on existing guidelines of antibiotics has been made with an objective to save on the cost of medicine rather than put patient health first.

The health service is currently riding the trend of developing sustainability in infrastructure and treatment, and this revision of traditional guidelines may seem to be a reframing of the evidence to suit a pre-determined outlook.

Let us return to the example of Greeks and Trojans. If the battle is raging within the Greek city walls and the tide turns against the Trojans, should the Greeks fire their ammunition at the retreating Trojans until they all fall to the ground? Ammunition in the form of gunpowder and metal casings cost money and if the ammunition could be used sparingly, then there is more money to funnel towards other daily activities like farming and livestock. The question we are being asked to address is the equivalent of this hypothetical situation: Should the Greeks keep firing their weapons, until all the Trojans fall before they manage to retreat and leave the Greek city walls, or should the Greeks try to save the cost of a few rounds of ammunition if they are certain the Trojans are so heavily wounded they would never survive the escape and make it to their own city walls to compromise the information they know about the secret weapon?

You may decide, as I did, that the cost of a few extra rounds of ammunition outweighs all the mental confusion of wondering “what if …?” for the next few months. “What if I didn’t take the medication long enough? What if the bacteria has mutated?”

You can see why it is easier that when it comes to health, be cautious, don’t customise. Don’t experiment on the one life you’ve got!

Why clinical trials exist, and how to sign up

A clinical trial is a research method that compares the effects of one treatment with another. The subjects of a clinical trial can be patients, healthy people, or both.

If you are interested to take part in a clinical trial, you can ask your doctor or a patient organisation if they know of any clinical trials that you may be eligible to join. Other ways of finding out including registering your interest in taking part in research online.

The UK Clinical Trials Gateway (UKCTG) website searches through different registers and pulls through information about clinical trials and other research from several different UK registers. When you sign up to it, researchers will get in touch about research that might be suitable for you.

While this is the main method of contact, you can also search the UKCTG site to find trials relevant to you, and you can contact researchers yourself.

If you are looking for something on a global basis, the World Health Organization’s Clinical Trials Search Portal provides access to clinical trials in countries all around the world.

Charities can also be a good source of clinical trials.

Some charities which look for people to take part in clinical trials include:

Arthritis Research UK: current clinical trials and studies
Cancer Research UK: find a clinical trial
Multiple Sclerosis Society: MS clinical trials
Target Ovarian Cancer: clinical trials information centre
Parkinson’s UK: clinical research

Why would anyone consider being a human guinea pig? If we are brutally honest, that is what it amounts to. And if we were being very honest, we might fine-tune it down to two reasons: treatment and financial incentives.

Clinical trials help doctors to understand about how they can treat a particular disease or condition. It may benefit you, or others like you, in the future. And if you participate in a clinical trial, you may be one of the first people to benefit from a new treatment. However, you must be prepared that the new treatment may turn out to be no better, or worse, than the standard treatment, and that your participation is the method through which they find out. However, you may be placed in the control group, which means you not receive any treatment, but others who do have their results compared to you – and that can be very disappointing.

Some clinical trials offer payment, which can vary from hundreds to thousands of pounds depending on what is involved and expected from you. The majority of trials however are unlikely to offer payment beyond your travel expenses.

Before you sign up to a trial, it is important to find out about the inconvenience and risks involved and to carefully weigh up whether it is worth it. You have to remember that trials can be time consuming – you may be expected to attend a number of screening and follow-up sessions, and some trials require you to stay overnight. In addition to the constraints placed on your time, there may be restrictions on what you can and cannot do – for example, you may be asked to not eat or drink alcohol for a period of time. As trials are essentially the assessment of treatment in their experimental stages, you may experience unknown side effects from the treatment.

All clinical trials of new medicines go through three or four phases to test whether they are safe and whether they work. The medicines will usually be tested against another treatment called a control and the results compared to note any significant effect. The control will either be a dummy treatment (a placebo) or a standard treatment already in use.

The first phase of the trials involves a small number of people, who may be healthy volunteers, are they are given the medicine. In this phase, the drug is being trialled in human volunteers for the first time and the purpose is for the researchers to test for side effects and calculate what the right dose might be to use in treatment. Unfortunately if the doseage is too high side effects can be uncomfortable. Researchers start with small doses and only increase the dose if the volunteers don’t experience any side effects, or if they only experience minor side effects. Sometimes the threshold to which side effects occur is sought – not nice!

In the second phase, the new medicine is tested on a larger group of people who are ill. After having passed the side effects filter, this stage is to get a better idea of its effects in the short term.

The third phase involves medicines that have passed phases one and two. These medicines are tested in larger groups of people who are ill, and then they are compared against an existing treatment or a placebo to compare the benefits or side effects. Often after this stage the treatment is examined for its cost-effectiveness as well.

Some medicines undergo a fourth trial phase while they have been passed for use. The safety, side effects and effectiveness of the medicine continue to be studied while it is being used in practice. However, this is not required for every medicine. It is only carried out on medicines that have passed all the previous stages and have been given marketing licences – a licence means the medicine can be made available on prescription. You can find out about the whole process here in greater detail.

You cannot choose which group you are put in when you are accepted for a clinical trial. You will usually be randomly assigned to either the treatment group – where you’ll be given the treatment being assessed, or the control group – where you’ll be given an existing standard treatment, or a placebo if no proven standard treatment exists.

And while the treatments are different in the two groups, researchers try to keep as many of the other conditions the same as possible, so that the effect of the treatment can be fully quantified. The conditions may extend to the trial groups. For example, both groups should have people of a similar age, with a similar proportion of men and women, who are in similar overall health. In most trials, a computer will be used to randomly decide which group each patient will be allocated to, in order to avoid human bias in selection. In many trials, nobody knows who’s been allocated to receive which treatment. This is known as blinding, and it helps reduce the effects of bias when comparing the outcomes of the treatments.

If you do express interest in a trial, a doctor or nurse is likely to tell you something about it in person before you undergo it. You’ll also be given some printed literature to take away, and if you have concerns over the trial you may come back with some questions you feel haven’t been answered.

Some questions you may ask may include:

What is the aim of the trial and how will it help people?
Who is funding the trial?
What treatment will I get if I do not take part in the trial?
How long is the trial expected to last, and how long will I have to take part?
How long will it be before the results of the trial are known?
What will happen if I stop the trial treatment or leave the trial before it ends?
What would happen if something went wrong? It’s rare for patients to be harmed by trial treatments, but you may want to ask about compensation if this were to happen.
Practical questions
How much of my time will be needed?
Will I need to take time off work?
Will I be paid?
Will the costs of my travel to take part in the trial be covered?
If the trial is testing a new drug, will I have to collect it from the hospital, will it be sent to me by post, or will I get it through my doctor?
Will I have to complete questionnaires or keep a diary?
What are the possible side effects of my treatment?
How could the treatments affect me physically and emotionally?
Who can I contact if I have a problem?
Will someone be available 24 hours a day?
How do I find out the results of the trial?

There are many questions you may have and it is best to feel fully secure before you undergo a trial. As in the case with any treatment, you can’t be sure of the outcome. And if you are part of the treatment group, you may be given a new treatment that turns out not to be as effective as the standard treatment. As with all medicines, it’s possible you’ll experience unexpected side effects. And while it is rare, you must be prepared that you may leave the trial in a slightly poorer state of health than when you entered it! You may decide to stop taking part in a trial if your condition is getting worse or if you feel the treatment isn’t helping you. Your departure can be at any point without giving a reason and without it affecting the care you receive.

A good thing to also bear in mind about trials, too, is that you may have to visit your place of treatment more often, or have more tests, treatments or monitoring, than you would if you were receiving the standard treatment in usual care.

At the end of the trial, the results are published by the researchers and are then made available to anyone who took part and wanted to know the results. If the researchers neglect to offer you the results and you want to know, you are well within your right to ask for them. Bigger agencies such as the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), have websites where they publish the results of the research they have supported.

Trials are regulated and judged ethical by the MHRA. Before a clinical trial of a new medicine can begin, a government agency called the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) needs to review and authorise it. One of the functions the MHRA performs is in inspecting sites where trials take place to make sure they’re conducted in line with good clinical practice.

Another body, the Health Research Authority (HRA) works to protect and promote the interests of patients and the public in health research. It is responsible for research ethics committees up and down the country.

All medical research involving people in the UK, whether in the NHS or the private sector, first has to be approved by an independent research ethics committee. The committee protects the rights and interests of the people who will be in the trial.

What are the benefit of clinical trials? Well, they can benefit us in many ways. For example, clinical trials can:

prevent illnesses by testing a vaccine
detect or diagnose illnesses by testing a scan or blood test
treat illnesses by testing new or existing medicines
find out how best to provide psychological support
find out how people can control their symptoms or improve their quality of life – for example, by testing how a particular diet affects a condition

Many clinical trials are designed to show whether new medicines work as expected. These results are sent to the MHRA, which decides whether to allow the company making the medicine to market it for a particular use. The company usually applies for a twenty year patent to cover the research and marketing of the drug exclusively.

If research has identified a new medicine, the MHRA must license it before it can be marketed. Licensing shows a treatment has met certain standards of safety and effectiveness. The safety of the medicine must be monitored carefully over the first few years of a newly licensed treatment. This is because rare side effects that weren’t obvious in clinical trials may show up for the first time.

You may not have been selected for a trial but you may express interest in the results. You can find various results of clinical trials from sources such as:

The Lancet medical journal
British Medical Journal (BMJ)
The New England Journal of Medicine
Cochrane Library – a collection of high-quality evidence
NHS Evidence database

Many of these publications offer abstracts, which are shorter summaries of the research. If you wish to delve deeper,
you usually have to take up a subscription to the journal. But before you do so, consider that research papers are not written in plain English and often use many medical, scientific and statistical terms which then make them possibly very difficult to understand.

The mainstream media offer a more readable version of the research. But do bear in mind, too, that while news stories are easier to read than original research papers, sometimes the findings are exaggerated or sensationalised in order to sell papers!