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An end to Alzheimer’s disease? People living into their 120s? All thanks to a miraculous new drug?

If you read the story on the this web site from Britain’s Daily Telegraph about a planned trial of the not-so-new drug Metformin, you might have thought “This sounds too good to be true.” And you would have been pretty much right on target.

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In fact, the article serves inadvertently as a sort of primer on how not to cover health care and especially pharmaceutical development, something I’ve done for the last decade.

The two rules of health reporting, according to my personal playbook are 1) don’t needlessly scare people, because disease is frightening enough without exaggeration and, 2) don’t falsely raise hope or promote a health product before it’s proven.

The Telegraph article did the latter, in spades.

The story talked about what is, granted, a fascinating study being spearheaded by Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.