I agree about the updates. However, news sites like this one aren’t combing through research to find things to update. They’re responding to PR outreach from companies. Did you notice there isn’t actually a link to a new publication? It’s only quotes from the company. They’re repeating PR material, not updates on the research.

There’s a subtext here that isn’t immediately obvious without reading more from the company trying to commercialize this formula: Their small phase 2 trial is underway but results haven’t fully been released as far as I can tell. It appears they’re trying to do a PR push based on their early claims of positive results, before publishing everything. If anyone can find more details please correct me if I’m wrong.

This can be a little suspicious when companies do this because before the full results are available because it’s usually associated with a rushed push to drive investor interest at the time they think it’s most optimal. When the optimal PR push timing is before full results are released, it’s not a good signal that the results are on track to be great.

The typical publishing methods kind of favors that approach of publishing new articles instead of updating existing ones though, for better or worse.

Maybe science journalism should just adopt a wiki-model instead, where there is one article per "subject" then any new (confirmed?) information/data goes into that, and interested people can subscribe to updates there instead.

Wikis generally have much better long-term maintenance given the right individuals running it, compared to a "publication journal" where things tend to get out of date eventually, with no way of actually seeing when old articles get updated.

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