Evaluating cancer awareness months and cancer screening tests through internet search big data.

Abstract

e24038 Background: Cancer Awareness Months (CAMs) aim to increase public recognition of specific cancers through education and screening promotion, but their effectiveness is uncertain. This study was designed to characterize the relationship between internet search interest (ISI) of breast, colon, lung, and prostate cancers and related screening test terms with their respective CAMs with the goal of better understanding CAM effectiveness across time and geographic scale. Methods: ISI was collected from sampled Google Search data from Google Trends on a national, state, and metropolitan level between 2004 and 2021. The ISI for cancer and cancer screening terms for each respective CAM was compared to ISI for nonadjacent months and across regionality. Results: Breast CAM was associated with increased ISI for both cancer (p > 0.001) and cancer screening (p > 0.001) terms. Colon CAM was associated with higher cancer term ISI (p = 0.004), but had mixed effects on screening ISI across terms. Lung CAM was not associated with a change in cancer term ISI (p = 0.573) and had mixed effects across screening terms. Prostate CAM was not linked to ISI changes for any associated terms. Regional variation in ISI was found in all cases. Conclusions: Given the high accessibility and scalability of Google Trends, this tool can be used to practically evaluate and guide the strategies of CAM campaigns across cancer type and geographic scale. Future directions include broadening the geographic scope and comparatively assessing specific CAM campaign strategies.