Science Matters

Ad nauseum: How rigged science sells pills

Boyce Rensberger

(6/2025) If you watch television a lot, you’ve seen ads for products that claim to improve your memory, especially a pill called Prevagen. Do you remember the commercial that began with the words, "Your brain is an amazing thing"? It went on to say the product containing an ingredient found in, surprise, jellyfish. There was a pretty video of jellyfish waving their tentacles rhythmically.

The announcer called it a "breakthrough" that "actually improves memory."

That sounded pretty interesting to me. At my advancing age lapses in memory are increasingly common. And it was not lost on me that the word Prevagen sounds like "prevent aging." (Oh, the marvels of ad agency creativity!)

To support its claim, the commercial said the product had been tested in clinical trials. Sounds good. That’s something that savvy consumers want to know. The commercial featured a sciency-looking bar chart showing that after 90 days Prevagen boosted short term memory by between 15 and 20 percent.

I never bought the stuff, because I am a skeptic about almost all advertising claims, but lately I have noticed that Prevagen commercials have dropped the amazing-brain and jellyfish business and now offer simple personal testimonials that sound like ordinary people in a calm conversation. For example, the announcer says, "David takes Prevagen for his brain, and this is his story." Then David comes on and tells how he thinks his brain is better. No health or medical claims; just regular folks who say it works for them.

What happened to the jellyfish and the bar chart? A Federal court made them stop. The Federal Trade Commission, along with the New York State Attorney General, had sued the manufacturer, Quincy Bioscience, alleging fraudulent advertising. That was seven years ago. But only last winter did the court issue its ruling.

The company didn’t have to take Prevagen off the market; it just had to stop claiming there was scientific evidence that it worked.

There was a clinical trial, all right, but when the manufacturer was forced to show the court what happened in the one trial, it turned out that the company had manipulated the results, over-counting people who seemed to improve and under-counting people who didn’t improve or, who, in fact, got worse.

You’re not supposed to do that in real science. Drug companies are famous for manipulating the design of clinical trials or the findings or both. Sometimes it’s as simple as spotting patients in the study whose results look very bad and saying this just can’t be right, so we won’t count those people.

I know this because a friend of mine who used to be a good medical journalist switched careers and began helping drug companies tailor their research reports and their press releases to make their pills look better. He’s not proud of this turn in his career, but it did let him put two kids through college at the same time.

Just last December, after seven years of litigation, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered Quincy Bioscience to stop making false claims about Prevagen's effectiveness.

The director of FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection issued this statement: "Following seven years of hard-fought litigation, including a jury trial, we are pleased that the Court has ordered Quincy Bioscience to cease making claims about Prevagen that mislead Americans concerned about memory loss. Companies should take note and remember that health claims need to be backed up by reliable scientific evidence."

Although Prevagen is still heavily advertised on TV, gone are claims of evidence. Now what we get are those testimonials from "real people." It’s not clear whether the people on camera really take Prevagen or are merely actors saying so. Having spent a small part of my career making TV shows, I know how hard it is to get people to look and speak "naturally" on camera. It takes scripting or at least prompting, repeated takes and clever editing.

Prevagen is not alone in claiming or suggesting that their product improves memory. There are also pills such as Neuriva, RediMind, Dynamic Brain, and Focus Factor. Sadly, they don’t have the ingredient found in jellyfish. Instead, they have various combinations of vitamins, minerals, herbs, and other substances that can all be sold legally as dietary supplements. The brain health supplement market was estimated at $7.6 billion in 2021 and predicted to increase to more than $15 billion by 2030.

You may be surprised to know that there is no government regulation of "supplements," not even before Trump. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) does not have the authority to evaluate dietary supplements for safety, effectiveness, or labeling. If the company doesn’t make any health claims, the F.D.A. can do nothing. Prevagen got nailed because it said there was real clinical evidence of memory improvement.

Marketers know that the number of older Americans is growing and also their worries about memory. Growing right along is the number of oldsters with a weak grasp of what constitutes evidence.

Testimonials, as Prevagen is now offering, are not evidence. Remember the placebo effect: if you think it’s going to work, you are likely to feel that it is working, especially if you paid good money for it. To be sure, a sense of confidence may well perk up your brain and make it perform better than usual. There do appear to be natural mechanisms in our bodies that can be boosted by faith in some person or pill.

Real evidence would be something called a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial. I’ve discussed these in an earlier column. People are randomly assigned to a group that will get the pill or to the placebo group which will get a dummy pill. The subjects are said to be "blind" as to which group they are in. An even better version of clinical trial is "double blind," meaning that even the scientists, especially those evaluating each person don’t know which is which. They evaluated results strictly on objective measures.

In a double-blind trial, a monitor or nowadays a computer randomly assigns each subject a code number and a group. Once the trial is finished, the code is broken, and researchers can see who got what.

In the Prevagen trial there was one more bit of evidence. The jury learned that the main ingredient—the stuff from jellyfish—is rapidly digested in the stomach and that very little reaches the bloodstream.

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