How Do Weekly Magazines Provide Information on Urogenital Cancer to the Public in Aged Societies?

Abstract

Little information on cancer coverage ra ther 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 w as 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.