Erratum

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Refers to: Representations of cosmetic surgery and emotional health in women's magazines in Canada. Women's Health Issues, Volume 18, Issue 6, November–December 2008, Pages 463–470, by Andrea N. Polonijo and Richard M. Carpiano.

Table 2 (below) is corrected to show updated age distributions for the columns under “Age of recipient.” Only the last 2 columns (35–50; >50) were initially labeled incorrectly; the actual values for each of these columns remain unchanged from the original table.

Table 2. Types of Cosmetic Surgery and Age of Recipients in Women's Magazines, 2002–2006 (n = 35)

N/A, not applicable.

Note: The percentages do not add up to 100 because some articles discussed more than one surgery or age group. Total percents in Canada are based on estimates reported by Medicard Finance (2005) and include both cosmetic and ancillary procedures.

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According to the Authors 

We conducted a later reading of Medicard's (2005) Internet-based report of their plastic surgery survey statistics in Canada and found a significant inconsistency in how they report age data, which, in turn, has implications for interpreting our study findings regarding discrepancies between the people portrayed in the study sample articles and the age distribution of plastic surgery recipients in Canada (i.e., results originally detailed in Table 2 and the text of our article). We found that Medicard (2005) reported age of recipient statistics in 3 different—yet contradictory—ways using the same percentage estimates across all 3 interpretations; that is, percent age distribution of plastic surgery patients; percent of practices reporting having patients from each of these 3 age groups (19–34, 35–50, and >50); and the age-specific percentage of total value of plastic surgery procedures. These contradictory interpretations raised significant concerns for us regarding the ability to accurately interpret the age distribution of plastic surgery recipients in Canada as reported by Medicard's (2005) study. Given our concerns for ethical research practices and reporting data in an accurate manner, we felt compelled to bring this issue to the attention of the readers of our article as a note of caution in evaluating our initial conclusions on the discrepancies between the ages of the people described in the articles that we sampled and the age distribution of recipients of plastic surgery in Canada, which were based on Medicard's (2005) study. We regret the need to raise this concern, but this second point was quite easy to misinterpret given the text of Medicard's report. A very close reexamination (including a calculation of their reported data) revealed these imprecise findings that were not fully apparent upon our initial readings of this report.

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Reference 

1. Medicard Finance . Cosmetic surgery statistics. Toronto, ON: Medicard Finance Inc; 2005;Available: http://www.cosmeticsurgerystatistics.caAccessed December 9, 2008
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