TITLE:
How Do Weekly Magazines Provide Information on Urogenital Cancer to the Public in Aged Societies?
AUTHORS:
Masayoshi Nagata, Tomoko Matsumura, Masahiro Kami
KEYWORDS:
Cancer Coverage; Weekly Magazine; Prostate Cancer
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Urology,
Vol.3 No.6,
October
17,
2013
ABSTRACT: Little information on cancer coverage rather
than newspaper and television is available. Japanese weekly magazines have a
circulation of over 2,700,000 per week. To examine how they delivered
urogenital cancer information to the public, cancer-related articles and advertisements
in six major Japanese weekly magazines from 2009 to 2010 was analyzed.
1.8% of total articles and advertisements were cancer-related. Prostate cancer
(n = 119) was the second-most common topic, following lung cancer (n = 145),
whereas only three articles were published on kidney or bladder cancer. The 53
articles on therapies for prostate cancer comprised radiotherapy (n = 29),
surgery (n = 16), chemotherapy (n = 4), and others (n = 4). All 42 comments or
interviews were cited in the article on prostate cancer, while 26 of them were
attributed to only two famous doctors. Although cancer coverage in weekly
magazines could be useful to spread information on prostate cancer, we should
recognize their considerable bias based on a disproportionate emphasis.