BACKGROUND Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a major public health problem that affects women's physical and mental health. According to the US National Institutes of Health Office of Disease Prevention, there is a need to improve public awareness of the syndrome among health care providers and the public. Women's magazines are a type of "edutainment" that publish health content in addition t...

CONTEXT Understanding the relationship between cigarette advertising and youth smoking is essential to develop effective interventions. Magazine advertising accounts for nearly half of all cigarette advertising expenditures. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether cigarette brands popular among adolescent smokers are more likely than adult brands to advertise in magazines with high adolescent reader...

OBJECTIVE: The goal was to evaluate pictures in magazines widely read by women of childbearing age, for adherence to American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) guidelines for safe infant sleep practices. METHODS: Magazines were included in this study if they had an average female readership of 5 million, circulation of 900 000, and median age of female readers of 20 to 40 years. Twenty magazines met ...

Background: In 1998 the attorneys general of 46 states signed a Master Settlement Agreement with the four largest tobacco companies in the United States. The agreement prohibits tobacco advertising that targets people younger than 18 years of age. Methods: We analyzed the trends in expenditures for advertising for 15 specific brands of cigarettes and the exposure of young people to cigarette ad...

OBJECTIVE To assess the influence of the media on girls' weight concerns, weight control/loss behaviors, and perceptions of body weight and shape. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey completed in school. The questionnaire assessed body weight, dissatisfaction with body weight and shape, exposure to fashion magazines, the impact of media on feelings about weight and shape, attributes of and preferen...

The influence of magazines on consumer behavior, particularly that of women, has been widely recognized. In his study of American magazines, Wood [9] declared that the magazine is one of four major forces affecting and controlling national public opinion. Magazines, together with newspapers, radio and television, provide consumers with information about goods and services. Since consumer educat...

This study examined how women's magazines framed breast cancer and silicone implants to determine whether they used a sense-making framework. Sense-making calls for existing gaps to be closed between what one group views as real and what another group experiences (Parrott, 1996). Analysis included 86 articles on cancer and implants published in four women's magazines from 1990 to 1997. Overall ...

Magazines focused on parenting are popular in the United States, and parents may use them to guide decisions about the health of their children. We analyzed issues of 2 popular parenting magazines published in the past 11 years during the months of peak ultraviolet radiation exposure for content related to sun protection and for advertisements for skin products that did and did not contain sun ...

This paper examines the uses of hypermedia technologies by popular science magazines, in the light of the potential implied by these technologies. In a series of two studies, we investigated the argumentation and readability of texts and hypertexts from six popular science magazines and we conducted an experimental study with one of the texts from the corpus. Results show that science magazines...