April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Promising Prescriptions? A Framing Analysis of News Coverage Surrounding the Alzheimer’s Prescription Drug Aduhelm
The current study examines the discourse in news coverage of the new Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm (generically known as Aducanumab-avwa). Alzheimer’s is a terminal, neurodegenerative disease that occurs in stages (early, mid, and late), each with corresponding biomedical and communication markers that illustrate the disease’s progression. Although no cure for Alzheimer’s currently exists, on June 7, 2021 a new drug was approved, through an accelerated process, by the FDA (Stewart, 2021, July 15). While Aduhelm is not a cure for the disease, and its effectiveness in slowing down the progression of the disease remains unclear, it does improve symptoms by reducing beta-amyloid deposits called plaques in the brain (Aduhelm, n.d.). Aduhelm, costing $56,000 a year, is not yet approved by insurance companies in the U.S., and has several side-effects, ranging from mild-to severe, including a recent death (Belluck, 2021, November 22; Cameron, 2021 June 22). With this in mind, we applied the theoretical lens of framing theory to better understand U.S. news media’s dynamic construction of meaning around Aduhelm over time, that could potentially affect its public perceptions of efficacy. We often look to the media for information about new technologies and scientific innovations in order to better understand current issues (Nisbet et al., 2003; Ophir & Jamieson, 2021). Essential to the construction of meaning are journalistic media frames, that can make otherwise. complex and technical medical information accessible to the public (Miller, 1956). Briefly, journalists’ emphasis-frames perform four functions: problem definition, causal analysis, moral judgement, and remedy promotion (Entman, 1993; 2004; 2007), that could influence audiences’ perceptions, in our case—of medical innovations. Therefore, framing provides a lens to better understand scientific and health-related issues through emphasizing or downplaying certain arguments and considerations over others (Nisbet et al., 2009). In this case Aduhelm, framing may be used to help (or hinder) audiences determine Aduhelm’s costs and benefits for Alzheimer’s treatment and deepen their own understanding in the process. To analyze how Aduhelm was framed in the media we collected news articles from September 1, 2019 (beginning of clinical trials), to November 30, 2021 using Factiva. All available full articles from four major newspapers, including USA Today, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal were collected, resulting in 232 articles. We are currently analyzing the news articles through a mixed-method approach, combining computational methods for text analysis (Analysis of Topic Model Networks, see Walter & Ophir, 2019), and in-depth qualitative analysis (see Braun & Clarke, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 2015). As a final step we will examine the categories for themes across the entire data set to describe the distribution of the frames of Aduhelm (Morse, 2008) over time and changes in framing in response to external events. Finally, we will discuss theoretical and practical implications, while also shedding light on public discourse around the new drug.