> It seems to me that “happiness in early adulthood may protect against dementia” is logically consistent with your proposed rewrite, “people who are depressed

> It seems to me that “happiness in early adulthood may protect against dementia” is logically consistent with your proposed rewrite, “people who are depressed early in adulthood have higher chance of dementia” Saying "the moon is white" is logically consistent with saying "the moon may be made of white cheese". Logical consistence isn't an excuse for a major university to make people believe that research supports something that isn't actually supported by their work. > On reading the title alone, I assumed a university marketer was trying to reframe in an interesting way what had been found in the study (something akin to your proposed summary) Yes that's definitely the reason. I couldn't find the article on the journal's website, but I imagine that the paper was honest about this being a correlation. We can debate whether the title (and some of the article) fits the definition of a lie, but it's 100% clickbait that will make some people believe something that has no basis in research, and they are exploiting that for PR reasons. And I actually wouldn't be surprised if the causality they suggest is true... But that kind of exaggeration makes it impossible to follow what we actually have evidence for, which is the opposite of what this kind of popular science articles should be doing.