On August 10th–more than a month ago–Gina Kolata gushed on the front page of The New York Times about a new test for Alzheimer’s disease which, she reported, “can be 100 percent accurate.” I criticized the report here, as did Chief Tracker Charlie Petit, in a separate post. It has taken the Times more than five weeks to issue its own correction, which appears today:

An article on Aug. 10 about spinal fluid tests in Alzheimer’s research left the incorrect impression that the test can predict the disease with 100 percent accuracy in all patients. (That impression was reinforced by the headline.) In fact, the test was found to be as much as 100 percent accurate in identifying a signature level of abnormal proteins in patients with memory loss who went on to develop Alzheimer’s — not in identifying patients who “are on their way” to developing the disease.

The article also misinterpreted an element of the researchers’ findings. Among a group of patients who had memory loss and developed Alzheimer’s within five years, every one had protein levels associated with the disease five years before; it was not the case that “every one of those patients with the proteins developed Alzheimer’s within five years.”

And the article misstated the source from which the finding of 100 percent accuracy was drawn. It came from a separate set of patients that the researchers examined to validate the protein signature they had identified in an initial group. (In the initial group, as the article noted, nearly every person with Alzheimer’s had the signature protein levels.)

Note the use of such phraseology as “left the incorrect impression,” and “misinterpreted,” and even “misstated,” which sounds like an accident.

This is the phrasing I don’t see: “The article was wrong when it said….”

Such clarity was also missing from the Aug. 24 blog post by the public editor at the Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, who, addressing the 100% claim, wrote, “the study said something much narrower than that.”

His prescription for fixing the story did not indict the reporter or the reporting, but said, instead:

A better approach in this case would have been to offer either a narrower claim for the 100% connection among factors or a broader description, less the absolute, of a promising new study of Alzheimer’s.

So I’ll say what he didn’t: An even better approach would have been to report and write the story accurately. The reporting was in error, the story was in error, and the Times should say so. Enough of this talk of “narrower claims” and “incorrect impressions.” The headline on Brisbane’s post was “The Trouble With Absolutes.” It should have been, “Times Errs on Alzheimer’s Story.”

The Times is the best paper in the country, maybe the world, although I don’t read enough languages to know. Why, then, does this correction read as if it were written by a student hiding under his desk, afraid of a rap on the knuckles?

Or am I getting an incorrect impression?

- Paul Raeburn

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