The title doesn't contain any conclusion.
Right, my bad. Misleading would be the correct word.
Full title as published in Lancet:
>Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory infections: systematic review and meta-analysis of stratified aggregate data
What with HN's 80 character limit something had to go!
I apologize for making it "misleading" but what would you have done?
No need to apologise. It's not misleading at all.
It's lacking. A good title should save a click for those who are not interested in details but just the conclusion.
It's a scientific study. It's conclusion is the study results which is a bunch of confidence intervals and statistics.
Someone else quoted this as the results from the study:
> For the primary comparison of any vitamin D versus placebo, the intervention did not statistically significantly affect overall ARI risk (OR 0·94 [95% CI 0·88–1·00], p=0·057; 40 studies; 61 589 participants; I2=26·4%).
Are you suggesting that should be in the title? Would it even fit?
Then the title could be "Meta analysis finds Vitamin D supplementation doesn't improve Acute Respiratory Illness" or some variation of that, which is something I've known about Vitamin D for a while.
The title should be something like "Could Vitamin D supplementation help prevent acute respiratory infection? Systematic review and meta-analysis".
When I read the "Vitamin D supplementation to prevent" part, I got excited because I thought the research implied that supplementation does help. So I had to read it.
With the first title, I wouldn't read the study because I've read dozens of other studies showing how Vitamin D supplementation doesn't improve health outcomes.