Inaccurate communication in health sciences: The case of 'partial artemisinin resistance' for the treatment of malaria

Background: Accurate scientific terminology is crucial in health sciences to avoid misinterpretations. The use of 'artemisinin resistance' to describe delayed parasite clearance may be inaccurately equated with full resistance, as is typically the case when 'resistance' is used with other pathogens, leading to potential confusion. In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) introduced 'partial artemisinin resistance' to more accurately reflect the delayed parasite clearance observed with artemisinin-based therapies.

Methods: We analyzed whether articles in PubMed accurately convey the concept of 'partial artemisinin resistance' using GPT-4 to generate related search terms. AntConc was employed for corpus analysis of retrieved articles to examine terminology in titles and abstracts. A manual review evaluated the use of the WHO concept of 'partial artemisinin resistance' in the full text of a subset of high-impact articles.

Results: Out of 4041 articles retrieved, only 7 % (n = 281) used 'partial' or 'delayed' in titles or abstracts. Even after 2018, when WHO introduced the term 'partial artemisinin resistance', only 10 % of articles included this. Manual analysis of 161 full-text articles revealed that 94 % did not use 'partial artemisinin resistance', and 59 % did not explain the concept of delayed parasite clearance.

Conclusion: The delayed introduction of the term 'partial artemisinin resistance' may have contributed to continued use of the scientifically questionable term 'artemisinin resistance'. This term may be misunderstood as full resistance, as is common with antibiotic resistance. Accurate terminology is essential for clear scientific communication, and precise terms should be established and consistently used from the outset by scientists and clinicians.