Medical Journals Ignore Prevention

In the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, August 2000 issue is a report of a new study by Steven Woolf, M.D., M.P.H., and Robert Johnson, Ph.D., of Virginia Commonwealth University. The report says that articles dealing with prevention only account for a minor portion of articles published in two prominent medical journals

The two journals studied were the The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The authors of the report, Woolf and Johnson discovered that 9 percent of the articles looked at prevention and screening, while 2 percent focused on healthy lifestyles. The explanation according to Woolf, one of the authors for why such a small portion of the journals is devoted to preventive medicine is that "only a small proportion of grants from the National Institutes of Health are awarded to preventive research."