On the Wall Street Journal’s health blog, Shirley S. Wang breathlessly reports that the drug Qnexa  (rhymes with xtkqlexa) has “demonstrated statistically significant weight loss compared to placebo.”

That sounded pretty good until I continued reading. The research by the drug’s maker, Vivus, found that about two-thirds of subjects lost at least 5 percent of their body weight. Scientifically significant it might be, but how significant is a 15-pound weight loss for somebody who weighs 300 pounds? Wang doesn’t get to the figures until her penultimate graf.

The story by Thomas Gryta on the Dow Jones news wires has an even more expansive lede, reporting that the drug “showed strong results in two late-stage studies.”  (I don’t have access to the Dow wires and am linking to the version on the CNN Money website.)

But his numbers–also low in the story–are much more striking than Wang’s. Instead of reporting a weight loss of at least 5 percent, he reports that in one study subjects showed an average weight loss of 14.7 percent of body weight, or 37 pounds, and in the other study, a loss of 13.2 percent of body weight, or 30 pounds.

This is tricky: Is it best to report the average weight loss, as Gryta did, or the minimum weight loss, per Wang?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I know how I’d get it. I’d call up a few weight-loss experts and ask them to help me sort this out. Neither Wang or Gryta did that.

At mid-day, Vivus’s stock was up about 70 percent.

The news was released today. We’ll check tomorrow’s newspapers to see how they cover it.

Grist for the mill: The Vivus press release.

-Paul Raeburn

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Health & Medicine Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.