Christa Lykke Christensen

LIFESTAT - Living with statins: An interdisciplinary project on the use of statins as a cholesterol-lowering treatment and for cardiovascular risk reduction.

Aim: LIFESTAT is an interdisciplinary project that leverages approaches and knowledge from medicine, the humanities and the social sciences to analyze the impact of statin use on health, lifestyle and well-being in cohorts of Danish citizens. The impetus for the study is the fact that 10% of the population in the Scandinavian countries are treated with statins in order to maintain good health and to avoid cardiovascular disease by counteracting high blood levels of cholesterol. The potential benefit of treatment with statins should be considered in light of evidence that statin use has prevalent and unintended side effects (e.g. myalgia, and glucose and exercise intolerance). Methods: The LIFESTAT project combines invasive human experiments, biomedical analyses, nationwide surveys, epidemiological studies, qualitative interviews, media content analyses, and ethnographic participant observations. The study investigates the biological consequences of statin treatment; determines the mechanism(s) by which statin use causes muscle and mitochondrial dysfunction; and analyzes achievement of treatment goals, people’s perception of disease risk, media influence on people’s risk and health perception, and the way people manage to live with the risk (personally, socially and technologically). Conclusions: The originality and success of LIFESTAT depend on and derive from its interdisciplinary approach, in which the disciplines converge into thorough and holistic study and describe the impact of statin use on the everyday life of statin users. This has the potential for much greater benefit than any one of the disciplines alone. Integrating traditional disciplines provides novel perspectives on potential current and future social, medical and personal benefits of statin use.

Healthy Ageing and Mediated Health Expertise

Abstract The media are, for many older people, one of the most important sources of information about health. In this article, I examine older people’s experiences and use of media to acquire knowledge about health issues relating to their own life. Key questions concern how media influence older people’s perceptions of health and to what extent they trust the media in relation to health issues. The study demonstrates that the media do not have a uniform influence among older people. For some, the media function as a guide to maintaining and experimenting with an active lifestyle in late life; for others, the media are met with a skeptical attitude as they are not trusted as a source of reliable and unequivocal information on health issues. The study is based on a qualitative interview study with men and women between 65 and 86 years.

The Mediatization of Fashion: The Case of Fashion Blogs

Spurred by digital media logics, blogs have challenged the role of the fashion industry and its mass media portfolio of fashion magazines as authoritative intermediaries of fashion. The chapter investigates how fashion blogs as a distinct type of fashion communication are influenced by the formal and informal logics of the blog as a media technological and generic hybrid. We argue that fashion blogging, being an example of intensified digital communication, challenges the authority of fashion as an institution and transforms previously important ways of fashion communication. The chapter is based on a qualitative analysis of two Danish fashion blogs that received the Danish Fashion Blog Award in 2015 for ‘Best female fashion blog’ and ‘Best personal blog’.

The mediatization of health expertise Health programmes on Danish public service television

This article concerns the Danish public service broadcaster, Danmark Radio, and the programmes on health it produced from 1990 to 2010. It applies a historical perspective and, methodologically, the study is based on a qualitative content analysis of selected health programmes. Theoretically, the article is informed by ‘mediatization’ theory and demonstrates how television influences changes to the discursive construction of health and health expertise in factual programming in this 20-year period. The analysis demonstrates how early factual programmes were dominated by information on illness, medical treatment and care and communicated by medical experts and laypeople, whereas later programmes present health as an individual and entrepreneurial project that rapidly changes and improves the individual’s lifestyle with the help of all kinds of lifestyle experts.