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Average Household Exposure to Newspaper Coverage about the Harmful Effects of Hormone Therapy and Population-Based Declines in Hormone Therapy Use

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Journal of General Internal Medicine Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Background

The news media facilitated the rapid dissemination of the findings from the estrogen plus progestin therapy arm of the Women’s Health Initiative (EPT-WHI).

Objective

To examine the relationship between the potential exposure to newspaper coverage and subsequent hormone therapy (HT) use.

Design/Population

Population-based cohort of women receiving mammography at 7 sites (327,144 postmenopausal women).

Measurements

The outcome was the monthly prevalence of self-reported HT use. Circulation data for local, regional, and national newspapers was used to create zip-code level measures of the estimated average household exposure to newspaper coverage that reported the harmful effects of HT in July 2002.

Results

Women had an average potential household exposure of 1.4 articles. There was substantial variation in the level of average household exposure to newspaper coverage; women from rural sites received less than women from urban sites. Use of HT declined for all average potential exposure groups after the publication of the EPT-WHI. HT prevalence among women who lived in areas where there was an average household exposure of at least 3 articles declined significantly more (45 to 27%) compared to women who lived in areas with <1 article (43 to 31%) during each of the subsequent 5 months (relative risks 0.86–0.92; p < .006 for all).

Conclusions

Greater average household exposure to newspaper coverage about the harms associated with HT was associated with a large population-based decline in HT use. Further studies should examine whether media coverage directly influences the health behavior of individual women.

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Acknowledgment

NCI staff with specific expertise relevant to this effort participated in multiple aspects of this project, including design, collection, management, analysis and interpretation of the data, and manuscript preparation. NCI provided support to this project through the BCSC cooperative agreements noted above that underwent peer review. The final version of the manuscript was approved by all study authors and principal investigators of the BCSC sites. The authors thank Mary Canales, PhD, RN; Anne Dorwaldt; and Anush Yousefian, MS for their help with abstracting the newspaper articles.

Financial Support

This work was supported by National Cancer Institute (NCI)-funded Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) co-operative agreements (U01CA86076, U01CA63740, U01CA86082, U01CA69976, U01CA63736, U01CA63731, U01CA70013, and U01CA70040).

Potential Financial Conflicts of Interest

None disclosed.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of General Medicine and Primary Care, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 1620 Tremont Street, Boston, MA, 02120-1613, USA

    Jennifer S. Haas MD, MSPH

  2. Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative, Seattle, WA, USA

    Diana L. Miglioretti PhD & Diana S. M. Buist PhD, MPH

  3. Office of Health Promotion Research, Departments of Family Medicine and Radiology, Vermont Cancer Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Berta Geller EdD

  4. Health Communications Branch, Office on Smoking and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA

    David E. Nelson MD, MPH

  5. Departments of Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Karla Kerlikowske MD

  6. General Internal Medicine Section, Department of Veterans Affairs, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Karla Kerlikowske MD

  7. Department of Family Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR, USA

    Patricia A. Carney PhD

  8. Department of Community & Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH, USA

    Patricia A. Carney PhD

  9. Applied Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Sarah Dash MPH & Rachel Ballard-Barbash MD, MPH

  10. Behavioral Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Erica S. Breslau PhD, MPH

Authors
  1. Jennifer S. Haas MD, MSPH
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  2. Diana L. Miglioretti PhD
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  3. Berta Geller EdD
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  4. Diana S. M. Buist PhD, MPH
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  5. David E. Nelson MD, MPH
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  6. Karla Kerlikowske MD
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  7. Patricia A. Carney PhD
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  8. Sarah Dash MPH
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  9. Erica S. Breslau PhD, MPH
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  10. Rachel Ballard-Barbash MD, MPH
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jennifer S. Haas MD, MSPH.

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Haas, J.S., Miglioretti, D.L., Geller, B. et al. Average Household Exposure to Newspaper Coverage about the Harmful Effects of Hormone Therapy and Population-Based Declines in Hormone Therapy Use. J GEN INTERN MED 22, 68–73 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-007-0122-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-007-0122-7

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