Magazines Feature Breast
Cancer More Than Heart Disease
Excerpt By Charnicia E. Huggins, Reuter's Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Heart disease is a much greater threat to women's health than breast cancer, yet most popular magazines, and women's magazines in particular, devote more space to covering breast cancer, new study findings show.

This disparity in media coverage, which increased during the past decade, may be one of the reasons why many women overestimate their risk of breast cancer and underestimate their risk of heart disease, according to lead study author Deena Blanchard and her colleagues. Blanchard conducted the study while a research assistant at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Scientists estimate that approximately one out of every eight women in the United States will develop breast cancer at some point in their lives. For heart disease, however, the risk is three times greater--an estimated one in three women in the United States are expected to develop the condition during their lifetime, the report indicates.

"It is tempting to speculate that the over-representation of breast cancer vis-a-vis heart disease in popular magazines, particularly women's magazines, may have an impact on women's perceptions of risk for the two diseases, which in turn could affect their adoption of preventive health behaviors, and compliance with screening recommendations," study co-author Dr. Dana H. Bovbjerg of Mount Sinai School of Medicine told Reuters Health.

The researchers investigated the over-representation of breast cancer in magazines using a Web-based search engine. They determined how many breast cancer and heart disease articles appeared in 73 women's, men's, news and other types of magazines from 1990-1999. The magazine titles ranged from "American Rifleman" and "Essence" to "Newsweek" and "Vogue."

Altogether, the magazines had a total of 697 articles that were about breast cancer or mentioned breast cancer and 546 articles about heart disease or that mentioned heart disease, the investigators report in the October issue of Preventive Medicine.

And as the researchers expected, this gap between the magazines' coverage of breast cancer and heart disease was not only evident throughout the 10-year study period, but greatly widened during that time, particularly from 1997 onward.

This discrepancy in disease coverage was especially noticeable among the 13 women's magazines included in the study, which had a total of 286 breast cancer-related articles and 109 heart disease-related articles during the study period.

When the authors excluded those magazines from their analysis, however, the gap in coverage still remained evident.

"The disparity between breast cancer and (cardiovascular disease) coverage can be seen across a wide spectrum of popular magazines," the authors write.

Thus, "the results of the present study are consistent with the possibility that disparities in media coverage may be one source of the increasingly well-documented disparities in perceived risks of breast cancer and cardiovascular disease," they conclude.

Commenting on the study, Susan Stewart, chair of the Women's Health Committee of the American Medical Women's Association, told Reuters Health that the popular myth is that "women get cancer, men get heart attacks."

"Probably the editorship of popular magazines are editorializing about what they see," she said. However, a lot of people who are reading these magazines and who are health conscious "are very open to learning more."

If editors would start publishing more articles on how to prevent heart disease and other serious conditions, "I think they (readers) would take heed," Stewart said.

Grants from the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Defense funded the study.

SOURCE: Preventive Medicine 2002;35:343-348.

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