Dementia Knowledge in Chinese Newspapers (2005-2020): A Topic Modeling Analysis

ABSTRACT

How public policies convey dementia is an important source of the public’s understanding of dementia, and newspapers are critical to depicting and disseminating this information to the public. The present study used topic modeling strategies to analyze Chinese newspaper portrayals of dementia from 2005 to 2020 to trace changes in key areas of dementia knowledge in relevant policies. Using WiseNews, the largest Chinese media database, we chose 45 newspapers from mainland China and identified 12,719 articles related to dementia. Using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), we performed a topic modeling analysis and identified the six most prevalent topics on dementia across articles: lifestyle recommendations, neighborhood life, foundational scientific research, celebrity and media portrayals, dementia caregiving, and pharmaceutical innovations – all related to the dementia knowledge scale’s four dimensions. Findings suggest a steady increase in the number of articles on dementia caregiving and a decline in lifestyle recommendations from 2005 to 2020. However, newspapers continued to stigmatize aging by regularly co-depicting dementia and old age and by using biased terminology. Among the first to investigate dementia’s portrayals in mainland Chinese newspapers, this study illuminates the need for expanding mass media campaigns to raise the country’s dementia knowledge to foster a dementia-inclusive society.

KEYWORDS:

• Alzheimer’s disease
• China
• dementia
• dementia knowledge
• latent Dirichlet allocation
• mass media
• newspaper
• topic modeling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08959420.2024.2348966.

Notes

1. These 45 newspapers are: Beijing Daily, Beijing Evening News, Beijing Morning Post, Beijing News, Beijing Youth Daily, Chengdu Economic Daily, China Youth Daily, Chinese Business View, Chongqing Daily, Chongqing Morning Post, ChuTian Metropolis Daily, Economic Daily, Farmers' Daily, Fujian Daily, Guangming Daily, Guangxi Daily, Guangzhou Daily, Hubei Daily, Jiangnan City Daily, Jiangxi Daily, Jiefang Daily, Legal Daily, Modern Express, Nanfang Daily, People's Daily, Qianjiang Evening News, Qilu Evening News, Qingdao Daily, Science and Technology Daily, Shanghai Morning Post, Shenzhen Evening News, Sichuan Daily, Southern Metropolis Daily, Southern Weekly, Tonight News Paper, Wenhui Daily, West China City Daily, Workers' Daily, Wuhan Morning Post, Xiaoxiang Morning Herald, Xinhua Daily, Xinhua Daily Telegraph, Xinmin Evening News, Yangcheng Evening News, and Zhejiang Daily.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science [#2023BSH004].