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The Media Coverage of Bruce Willis Reveals Unfamiliarity With Frontotemporal Degeneration

In 2022, Bruce Willis’ family released a statement saying that he had been diagnosed with aphasia (an acquired language impairment) and would no longer be acting. Ten months later, the Willis family released another statement indicating that he received a more specific diagnosis of frontotemporal de...

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Autores principales: Hurley, Robert S, Pillai, Jagan A, Leverenz, James B
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10693290/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38046892
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igad125
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author Hurley, Robert S
Pillai, Jagan A
Leverenz, James B
author_facet Hurley, Robert S
Pillai, Jagan A
Leverenz, James B
author_sort Hurley, Robert S
collection PubMed
description In 2022, Bruce Willis’ family released a statement saying that he had been diagnosed with aphasia (an acquired language impairment) and would no longer be acting. Ten months later, the Willis family released another statement indicating that he received a more specific diagnosis of frontotemporal degeneration (FTD). This resulted in an explosion of media coverage, as prominent news outlets scrambled to produce stories describing FTD to a public largely unfamiliar with the disease. The quality of these stories varied widely, and in many cases the relationship between aphasia and FTD was misrepresented, as were basic descriptions and facts about FTD. FTD refers to a class of protein-misfolding diseases that are a common cause of aphasias due to neurodegeneration, or primary progressive aphasias (PPA). Rather than describing how FTD was discovered to be the underlying source of Mr. Willis’ aphasia, many reports described his aphasia as “progressing into” FTD, implying they are two different disorders. Furthermore, these reports used the terminology of frontotemporal “dementia” rather than “degeneration”, a term that invokes many stereotypes in the public imagination and may have contributed to misrepresentations in coverage. Instead of focusing on the language symptoms of PPA, reports often emphasized the personality and behavioral changes more closely associated with other variants of FTD. The substance of various facts, such as how common FTD is and how it can be treated, varied widely across reports. In sum, the media coverage of Mr. Willis’ diagnosis reveals the extent to which the media and general public are uninformed about FTD and PPA. The remedy for this problem is to promote greater awareness of FTD, in both the public and the medical provider class. The Willis family’s disclosure was a courageous act that helped bring much-needed attention to this disease.
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spelling pubmed-106932902023-12-03 The Media Coverage of Bruce Willis Reveals Unfamiliarity With Frontotemporal Degeneration Hurley, Robert S Pillai, Jagan A Leverenz, James B Innov Aging Invited Article In 2022, Bruce Willis’ family released a statement saying that he had been diagnosed with aphasia (an acquired language impairment) and would no longer be acting. Ten months later, the Willis family released another statement indicating that he received a more specific diagnosis of frontotemporal degeneration (FTD). This resulted in an explosion of media coverage, as prominent news outlets scrambled to produce stories describing FTD to a public largely unfamiliar with the disease. The quality of these stories varied widely, and in many cases the relationship between aphasia and FTD was misrepresented, as were basic descriptions and facts about FTD. FTD refers to a class of protein-misfolding diseases that are a common cause of aphasias due to neurodegeneration, or primary progressive aphasias (PPA). Rather than describing how FTD was discovered to be the underlying source of Mr. Willis’ aphasia, many reports described his aphasia as “progressing into” FTD, implying they are two different disorders. Furthermore, these reports used the terminology of frontotemporal “dementia” rather than “degeneration”, a term that invokes many stereotypes in the public imagination and may have contributed to misrepresentations in coverage. Instead of focusing on the language symptoms of PPA, reports often emphasized the personality and behavioral changes more closely associated with other variants of FTD. The substance of various facts, such as how common FTD is and how it can be treated, varied widely across reports. In sum, the media coverage of Mr. Willis’ diagnosis reveals the extent to which the media and general public are uninformed about FTD and PPA. The remedy for this problem is to promote greater awareness of FTD, in both the public and the medical provider class. The Willis family’s disclosure was a courageous act that helped bring much-needed attention to this disease. Oxford University Press 2023-10-26 /pmc/articles/PMC10693290/ /pubmed/38046892 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igad125 Text en © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
spellingShingle Invited Article
Hurley, Robert S
Pillai, Jagan A
Leverenz, James B
The Media Coverage of Bruce Willis Reveals Unfamiliarity With Frontotemporal Degeneration
title The Media Coverage of Bruce Willis Reveals Unfamiliarity With Frontotemporal Degeneration
title_full The Media Coverage of Bruce Willis Reveals Unfamiliarity With Frontotemporal Degeneration
title_fullStr The Media Coverage of Bruce Willis Reveals Unfamiliarity With Frontotemporal Degeneration
title_full_unstemmed The Media Coverage of Bruce Willis Reveals Unfamiliarity With Frontotemporal Degeneration
title_short The Media Coverage of Bruce Willis Reveals Unfamiliarity With Frontotemporal Degeneration
title_sort media coverage of bruce willis reveals unfamiliarity with frontotemporal degeneration
topic Invited Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10693290/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38046892
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igad125
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