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Do Celebrity Cancer Diagnoses Promote Primary Cancer Prevention?
Abstract
Celebrity cancer diagnoses generate considerable media coverage of and increase interest in cancer screening, but do they also promote primary cancer prevention?
Daily trends for smoking cessation-related media (information-availability) and Google queries (information-seeking) around Brazilian President and smoker Lula da Silva's laryngeal cancer diagnosis announcements were compared to a typical period and several cessation awareness events.
Cessation media coverage was 163% (95%CI, 54-328) higher than expected the week after the announcement but returned to typical levels the second week. Cessation queries were 67% (95%CI, 40-96) greater the week after Lula's announcement, remaining 153% (95%CI, 121-188), 130% (95%CI, 101-163) and 71% (95%CI, 43-100) greater during the second, third, and fourth week after the announcement. There were 1.1 million excess cessation queries the month after Lula's announcement, eclipsing query volumes for the week around New Years Day, World No Tobacco Day, and Brazilian National No Smoking Day.
Just as celebrity diagnoses promote cancer screening, they may also promote primary prevention. Discovery of this dynamic suggests the public should be further encouraged to consider primary (in addition to the usual secondary) cancer prevention around celebrity diagnoses, though more cases, cancers, and prevention behaviors must be explored.
... While there are well-documented reports of notable people who died from complications of HNC, such as German Emperor Frederick III, US Presidents Ulysses Simpson Grant and Stephen Grover Cleveland, Austrian father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, baseball star George Herman "Babe" Ruth, and artist Sammy Davis [11,18,19], there is no documentation that any of them were involved in HNC prevention strategies, possibly due to limited knowledge of risk factors at the beginning of the 19th century [11]. In 2011, the announcement of Brazilian President Lula da Silva's laryngeal cancer diagnosis led to an increase in smoking cessation consultations within a month of media coverage, demonstrating that the HNC of notable people can promote primary prevention [20]. The latter highlights the powerful impact of notable people with lived experiences of HNC who are potential advocates for prevention. ...
... There is evidence to suggest that HNC diagnoses of notable people may promote primary prevention. For instance, in 2011, Brazilian President Lula da Silva's laryngeal cancer, attributed to smoking, promoted policymakers to enhance the existing aggressive tobacco control agenda [20]. Moreover, there was a significant increase in smoking cessation consultations in the four weeks following the announcement of President Lula's cancer compared to Brazil's National No Tobacco Day or World No Tobacco Day [20]. ...
... For instance, in 2011, Brazilian President Lula da Silva's laryngeal cancer, attributed to smoking, promoted policymakers to enhance the existing aggressive tobacco control agenda [20]. Moreover, there was a significant increase in smoking cessation consultations in the four weeks following the announcement of President Lula's cancer compared to Brazil's National No Tobacco Day or World No Tobacco Day [20]. ...
Background: The study of notable people as advocates for raising cancer awareness began in the latter decades of the 20th century. This research aimed to identify Pan-American notable people with head and neck cancer (HNC) and to explore senior health professionals’ perspectives on communicating stories of notable patients with HNC to promote prevention. Method: A cross-sectional survey was conducted using an online questionnaire designed in REDCap and administered to 32 senior health professionals with long-standing academic and clinical backgrounds in HNC. In addition, a structured literature review was performed on PubMed, Scopus, EMBASE, Web of Science, LILACS, and gray literature. Results: 18 notable figures were successfully identified from the survey, and 24 from the literature review. These individuals came from the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, and were recognized primarily for their performances as actors, artists, musicians, and athletes. The professionals’ outlooks were positive, with 31 (96.9%) agreeing that disseminating these stories can contribute to reducing risk behaviors. Furthermore, all participants (100%) agreed that such stories can promote early detection of HNC, primarily through social media, followed by the internet, and television. Conclusions: The study identified notable individuals and gathered positive perspectives from professionals. Our results suggest that notable people could serve as potential advocates for HNC prevention. Further research is warranted to explore the potential of this prevention strategy.
... Among the most common tools for infoveillance is Google Trends (GT), a feature provided by Google that allows for quantification of Google searches for specific terms or broader topic areas [17]. For example, GT has been used to monitor outbreaks of infectious diseases [14,15,[18][19][20], infer cancer incidences in specific geographic locations [3,21], and understand trends in health behaviors such as smoking cessation [22,23], suicide rates [24], uptake of cannabis products [25], and cancer screening [26,27]. It has also proven to be a valuable tool for tracking the impact of public health campaigns [22,28] and celebrity-related news [23,29,30]. ...
... For example, GT has been used to monitor outbreaks of infectious diseases [14,15,[18][19][20], infer cancer incidences in specific geographic locations [3,21], and understand trends in health behaviors such as smoking cessation [22,23], suicide rates [24], uptake of cannabis products [25], and cancer screening [26,27]. It has also proven to be a valuable tool for tracking the impact of public health campaigns [22,28] and celebrity-related news [23,29,30]. For example, by assessing search volumes, it has been determined that there was an increased interest in condoms and HIV testing following Charlie Sheen's disclosure of HIV [29], Asperger syndrome following Greta Thurnberg appearances [31], and mental health hotlines following Demi Lovato's overdose and Anthony Bourdain's suicide [30]. ...
... Although analyzing screening and corresponding detection rates of cancers takes time, infodemiology research can provide early insights that public health officials can act upon. Multiple studies have examined the changes in interest on the web concerning a celebrity event, and several have used a quasi-experimental approach like ours, in which increased search volumes following an event are quantified in relation to counterfactual forecasted volumes if the event had not occurred [23,30,33]. For example, studies have reported that search queries regarding smoking cessation interest in Brazil increased by up to 153% in the first week after president Lula da Silva's diagnosis of laryngeal cancer [23], HIV search queries in the United States increased by 417% in the week after Charlie Sheen's disclosure [29], and there was a 257% increase in vasculitis-related queries in the United States after Harold Allen Ramis' death [33]. ...
Background
Compared with White Americans, Black Americans have higher colon cancer mortality rates but lower up-to-date screening rates. Chadwick Boseman was a prominent Black American actor who died of colon cancer on August 28, 2020. As announcements of celebrity diagnoses often result in increased awareness, Boseman’s death may have resulted in greater interest in colon cancer on the internet, particularly among Black Americans.
Objective
This study aims to quantify the impact of Chadwick Boseman’s death on web-based search interest in colon cancer and determine whether there was an increase in interest in regions of the United States with a greater proportion of Black Americans.
Methods
We conducted an infoveillance study using Google Trends (GT) and Wikipedia pageview analysis. Using an autoregressive integrated moving average algorithm, we forecasted the weekly relative search volume (RSV) for GT search topics and terms related to colon cancer that would have been expected had his death not occurred and compared it with observed RSV data. This analysis was also conducted for the number of page views on the Wikipedia page for colorectal cancer. We then delineated GT RSV data for the term colon cancer for states and metropolitan areas in the United States and determined how the RSV values for these regions correlated with the percentage of Black Americans in that region. Differences in these correlations before and after Boseman’s death were compared to determine whether there was a shift in the racial demographics of the individuals conducting the searches.
ResultsThe observed RSVs for the topics colorectal cancer and colon cancer screening increased by 598% and 707%, respectively, and were on average 121% (95% CI 72%-193%) and 256% (95% CI 35%-814%) greater than expected during the first 3 months following Boseman’s death. Daily Wikipedia page view volume during the 2 months following Boseman’s death was on average 1979% (95% CI 1375%-2894%) greater than expected, and it was estimated that this represented 547,354 (95% CI 497,708-585,167) excess Wikipedia page views. Before Boseman’s death, there were negative correlations between the percentage of Black Americans living in a state or metropolitan area and the RSV for colon cancer in that area (r=−0.18 and r=−0.05, respectively). However, in the 2 weeks following his death, there were positive correlations between the RSV for colon cancer and the percentage of Black Americans per state and per metropolitan area (r=0.73 and r=0.33, respectively). These changes persisted for 4 months and were all statistically significant (P
... The mass media contributes to individuals' understandings of cancer incidence, risk, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis [28][29][30][31][32][33] and may provide 'cues to action' [34]. For example, media accounts of celebrities' cancer experiences are well-recognised catalysts for public behaviours [35]: interest in cancer and early detection increased sharply following President Ronald Regan's diagnosis of colon cancer in 1985 [36]; booking for mammography increased dramatically in the months following Kylie Minogue's diagnosis of breast cancer in 2005 [37]; and the 'Jade Goody Effect' was shown to impact the uptake of cervical screening, particularly amongst younger women [38][39][40][41] and more recently the high profile preventive double mastectomy of Angelina Jolie, saw a considerable increase in BRCA testing in the United States immediately following an editorial in the New York Times [42]. Equally, however, the media has been criticised for omitting 'mobilising' information that, in theory, allows readers to act on existing attitudes [41]. ...
... Celebrity coverage notwithstanding, the media framing literature demonstrates that portrayals of cancer are often negative, promoting frames of dread and fear [24,44], and frequently employ war and sporting metaphors [35,45,46]. Previous explorations of the representation of cancer in the media has compared the frequency of news coverage of specific cancer sites with their prevalence in the community and consistently demonstrates an overrepresentation of breast cancer and an underrepresentation of colorectal cancer [47]. ...
... Previous studies have shown that media coverage has a demonstrable impact on behaviour. High-profile celebrity cases, such as Jade Goody's diagnosis of cervical cancer and Kylie Minogue's diagnosis of breast cancer were associated with increased screening uptake [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. We propose therefore that a reasonable corollary to the mobilising effect of media coverage is that information that is missing or largely invisible is equally salient. ...
Background:
Increasing age is a risk factor for developing cancer. Yet, older people commonly underestimate this risk, are less likely to be aware of the early symptoms, and are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced stage cancer. Mass media are a key influence on the public's understanding health issues, including cancer risk. This study investigates how news media have represented age and other risk factors in the most common cancers over time.
Methods:
Eight hundred articles about the four most common cancers (breast, prostate, lung and colorectal) published within eight UK national newspapers in 2003, 2004, 2013 and 2014 were identified using the Nexis database. Relevant manifest content of articles was coded quantitatively and subjected to descriptive statistical analysis in SPSS to identify patterns across the data.
Results:
Risk was presented in half of the articles but this was rarely discussed in any depth and around a quarter of all articles introduced more than one risk factor, irrespective of cancer site. Age was mentioned as a risk factor in approximately 12% of all articles and this varied by cancer site. Age was most frequently reported in relation to prostate cancer and least often in articles about lung cancer. Articles featuring personal narratives more frequently focused on younger people and this was more pronounced in non-celebrity stories; only 15% of non-celebrity narratives were about people over 60. Other common risks discussed were family history and genetics, smoking, diet, alcohol, and environmental factors. Family history and genetics together featured as the most common risk factors. Risk factor reporting varied by site and family history was most commonly associated with breast cancer, diet with bowel cancer and smoking with lung cancer.
Conclusion:
Age and older adults were largely obscured in media representation of cancer and cancer experience. Indeed common risk factors in general were rarely discussed in any depth. Our findings will usefully inform the development of future cancer awareness campaigns and media guidelines. It is important that older adults appreciate their heightened risk, particularly in the context of help-seeking decisions.
... A good example of intensive use of media, celebrities and fashion in Brazil can be seen in the campaign "Fashion Targets Breast Cancer" promoted in 1995 by the IBCC (Brazilian Institute Against Cancer) and supported by the biggest Brazilian media names. It is a long-standing belief that famous persons are capable of influencing health care behaviors and searching for information on early signs and prevention, which is described as a "celebrity effect" 35,41,42 . There are evidences that describe how spotlights on public disclosures pose a positive major advance in terms of how celebrity cases are leveraged for public health impacts 37,38 . ...
... The same happened in May/June 2008, after Cynthia Nixon's disclosure 44 [45][46][47] . Several authors believe that publicized personal experiences by famous people may amplify public expectations and latent interest on identification of diseases 35,41,42,48 . Important to consider that our findings can not be linearly comparable between themselves in terms of magnitudes of public events. ...
... Therefore, the premises that the collective interest raised by celebrities would leverage people to search information on early BC detection were not here confirmed. These findings refute recent papers which report significant impacts on primary and secondary prevention of diseases after public revelations 35,41,48,49 . In a recent work, Ayers compared smoking cessation awareness events with Google queries related to Brazilian President and smoker Lula da Silva's laryngeal cancer diagnosis announcements 41 . ...
Delays in diagnosis due to low Breast Cancer awareness are widespread in Brazil maybe owing to ineffective strategies to raise attention on early diagnosis. As a proxy of collective interest in BC screanning (BCS) we studied the monthly accesses to BC and BCS webpages in INCA's website along 48 months. A log analyzer built a time serie (2006-2009) of BC and BCS monthly means, which oscilations were studied by analysis of variance (ANOVA). We found significant increasing accesses to BC and transient “attention peaks”. Enlargement in BC/BCS differences along all period were caused by increasing accesses to BC and decreasing/minor/stable oscillations to SBC pages. These results are consistent with previous reports on increasing interest to BC contrasting with indifference on BCS. In the context of an exploratory study, we discussed some aspects: weakness of a “prevention culture”; lack of confidence in health system and screening programs; “celebrity effect” in the context of media framing; collective perception of risks heightened by perception of social vulnerability. Findings suggest that culture-tailored communication strategies would be necessary to inform Brazilian people about BCS. Future research is needed to study social perceptions and constructions on BC topics.
... The persuasive power of celebrity endorsements has been identified across a variety of health behaviors, including cancer screening (Ayers et al., 2014) and substance use (Vafeiadis et al., 2022). Tom Hanks's disclosure of his COVID-19 diagnosis was found to be helpful in encouraging people's preventive behaviors against the virus (Myrick & Willoughby, 2021b). ...
... Celebrities' health disclosures can play a critical role in shaping people's health attitudes, intentions, and behaviors (Ayers et al., 2014;Brown & Basil, 2010;Myrick & Willoughby, 2021a). In social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), individuals' behaviors can be impacted by observational learning, which is essential to human development in all stages of life. ...
This study examined the effects of hope appeals, celebrity endorser types, and valence of emoticons on COVID-19 vaccine confidence, hesitancy, and intention to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The potential moderating effects of parasocial identification were also assessed. Experiment 1 was a 2 (hope appeals: high vs. low personal relevance) x 3 (celebrity types: politicians vs. scientists vs. athletes) between-subjects experiment with a sample of U.S. adults (N = 363). Experiment 2 was a 2 (hope appeals: high vs. low personal relevance) x 3 (valence of emoticons: positive vs. neutral vs. negative) between-subjects experiment with a sample of
U.S. adults (N = 369). Findings indicated that COVID-19 vaccine messages with politician endorsement and low personal relevance significantly influenced intention to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Moreover, COVID-19 vaccine messages with neutral emoticons significantly impacted COVID-19 vaccine confidence and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Parasocial identification with the endorser was also found to play a role in affecting vaccine hesitancy. Implications for future research in vaccine communication are discussed.
... For example, in 2011, the laryngeal cancer of Brazilian President Lula da Silva was attributed to smoking and his case led Brazilian policymakers to increase the already existing aggressive tobacco control agenda. [17] Moreover, there was a significant increase in smoking cessation consultations compared to the week of Brazil's National No Tobacco Day or World No Tobacco Day during the entire 4-week period following the announcement of Brazilian president Lula's cancer. [17] Prevention strategies for HNC involve a decrease in exposure to risk factors (e.g. ...
... [17] Moreover, there was a significant increase in smoking cessation consultations compared to the week of Brazil's National No Tobacco Day or World No Tobacco Day during the entire 4-week period following the announcement of Brazilian president Lula's cancer. [17] Prevention strategies for HNC involve a decrease in exposure to risk factors (e.g. tobacco, and alcohol consumption) and implementing HPV vaccination in primary prevention of HPV related cancers. ...
The study of notable people as agents for increasing cancer awareness started just in the last decades of the 20th century. This study aimed to identify Pan-American notable people with head and neck cancer (HNC) and to assess HNC’s professional perspective on communicating stories of notable patients with HNC to promote prevention. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted by applying a RedCap questionnaire to oral medicinists, oral pathologists, head and neck surgeons, and clinical oncologists with experience in HNC research, education, or treatment in Pan-American countries. Additionally, a structured search was performed on PubMed, Scopus, EMBASE, Web of Science, LILACS, and gray literature Results: We identified 42 notable people from the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia, and Peru who were mainly actors, athletes, and musicians. Participants agreed that stories of notable patients with HNC can positively impact the population and promote prevention if communicated by the internet, social media, and television. Conclusion: In the Pan-American region, notable individuals who have suffered from HNC may be powerful advocates for increasing cancer awareness and promoting prevention strategies. The professionals involved in the study expressed a positive inclination towards using the stories of these notable HNC survivors as an effective prevention strategy.
... The results showed that there was a poor relationship between moon phases and epilepsy. Ayers et al (2014) studied the relationship between health ISB of users and cancer prevention. The results indicated that just the timely diagnosis and treatment could promote the cancer screening. ...
... Shortly after this news, the internet searches about "breast cancer" increased expotentially. Earlier researchers (Ayers et al, 2014;Brigo et al, 2014;Dehkordy et al, 2014;DeVilbiss and Lee, 2014) reported the effects of famous celebrities on public's concern and anxiety about different diseases as well as TV and radio beoadcasts. As mentioned before, the number of Iranian scientific publications on breast cancer indexed in PubMed has been increasing exponentially during 2011 to 2015. ...
Purpose
According to the studies conducted in Iran, the breast cancer is the most frequent type of cancer among women. This study explored the state of health information supply and demand on breast cancer among Iranian medical researchers and Iranian web users during 2011 to 2015.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed method research (MM) was conducted in this study. In qualitative part, a focus group interview was applied to the users to identify their selected keywords searched for breast cancer in Google. The collected data were analyzed using Open Code software. In quantitative part, data were synthesized using R software in two parts. First, users’ internet information seeking behavior (ISB) was analyzed using Google Trends outputs during 2011 to 2015. Second, the SPB of Iranian breast cancer specialists were surveyed using PubMed during the period of the study
Findings
The results showed that the search volume index of preferred keywords on breast cancer have increased from 4119 in 2011 to 4772 in 2015. Also, the findings revealed that Iranian scholars had 873 scientific papers on breast cancer in PubMed during 2011 to 2015. There was a significant and positive relationship between Iranian ISB in the Google Trends and scientific publication behavior (SPB) of Iranian scholars on breast cancer in PubMed.
Research limitations/implications
This study only investigated the state of health information supply and demand in PubMed and Google Trends and not additional databases often used for medical studies and treatment.
Originality/value
The current study provides a road map for health policymakers in Iran to direct the breast cancer studies.
... As a result, testing is the most cost-effective HIV prevention strategy (Lin et al. 2016) and must be accelerated when opportunities are presented. Yet, many opportunities to promote HIV testing are missed (Frieden et al. 2015), in part, because many opportunities are not captured by traditional HIV prevention surveillance due to reporting delays and trouble measuring specific timeframes of behavior in sentinel surveillance or health surveys (Ayers et al. 2014a, b). ...
... Sheen's disclosure invigorated public engagement with HIV prevention, motivated record sales of rapid inhome HIV test kits, surpassed World Aids Day by a factor of about 7, and were validly predicted by Web search trends. Our new findings reinforce how celebrity can impact health decision-making (Ayers et al. 2014a, b;Noar et al. 2013) and make an even stronger case that Sheen's disclosure promoted HIV prevention, thanks to the availability of rapid in-home HIV testing. In particular, the public's health decisions are heavily influenced by public figures and reveal an opportunity for the prevention community to target health behaviors when related issues are widely publicized in the media (Hoffman and Tan 2013). ...
One in eight of the 1.2 million Americans living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are unaware of their positive status, and untested individuals are responsible for most new infections. As a result, testing is the most cost-effective HIV prevention strategy and must be accelerated when opportunities are presented. Web searches for HIV spiked around actor Charlie Sheen's HIV-positive disclosure. However, it is unknown whether Sheen's disclosure impacted offline behaviors like HIV testing. The goal of this study was to determine if Sheen's HIV disclosure was a record-setting HIV prevention event and determine if Web searches presage increases in testing allowing for rapid detection and reaction in the future. Sales of OraQuick rapid in-home HIV test kits in the USA were monitored weekly from April 12, 2014, to April 16, 2016, alongside Web searches including the terms "test," "tests," or "testing" and "HIV" as accessed from Google Trends. Changes in OraQuick sales around Sheen's disclosure and prediction models using Web searches were assessed. OraQuick sales rose 95% (95% CI, 75-117; p < 0.001) of the week of Sheen's disclosure and remained elevated for 4 more weeks (p < 0.05). In total, there were 8225 more sales than expected around Sheen's disclosure, surpassing World AIDS Day by a factor of about 7. Moreover, Web searches mirrored OraQuick sales trends (r = 0.79), demonstrating their ability to presage increases in testing. The "Charlie Sheen effect" represents an important opportunity for a public health response, and in the future, Web searches can be used to detect and act on more opportunities to foster prevention behaviors.
... Similarly, the three above-mentioned words identify specific pages in Wikipedia database. The same approach was used in previous studies in which Internet search peaks were assessed in relation to celebrities' cancer diagnoses [17,18]. ...
A cross-sectional study was designed to assess the impact of a celebrity's announcement of having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on the volume of cancer-related research on the Internet. Global searches were carried out on Google Trends (GT) for the period from 1 January 2004 to 20 November 2022 (since data prior to 2004 were not available) using the search words Tumore del Pancreas (pancreatic cancer), Tumore neuroendocrino (neuroendocrine tumor), and Fedez (the name of a popular Italian rapper). The frequency of specific page views for Fedez, Tumore del pancreas, and Tumore neuroendocrino was collected via Wikipedia Trends data. Statistical analyses were carried out using the Pearson correlation coefficient (r). The GT data revealed a strong correlation (r = 0.83) while the Wikipedia Trends data indicated a moderate correlation (r = 0.37) for Tumore neuroendocrino and Tumore del pancreas. The search peaks for the GT and Wikipedia pages occur during the same time period. An association was found between the celebrity's announcement of his pancreatic cancer diagnosis and the volume of pancreatic-cancer-related online searches. Our findings demonstrate that media events and media coverage of health-related news can raise people's curiosity and desire for health information.
... Considering the functions of narratives could be helpful in journalist or celebrity narratives in cancer (Ayers, Althouse, Noar & Cohen, 2014;Evans, Chapple, Salisbury, Corrie & Ziebland, 2014;Walter, 2010;Wood & Bollinger, 2020), to understand how their stories may help audiences. Although Frank's typologies are applicable to various contexts in health and social aspects of illness experience, others have tried to critically assess the role of cancer narrative communication in the prevention and control of the disease (Kreuter et al., 2007). ...
Cancer communication
Oesophageal cancer experience
Health promotion
Health journalism
... Understudied but important factors that can contribute to behavior change are historical factors. Oftentimes, the most notable historical factors pertain to celebrities' engagement with a health topic [16][17][18]. With regard to CRC specifically, researchers noted an increase in CRC screening after a newscaster, Katie Couric, announced her CRC awareness campaign in March 2000 on the Today Show [19]. ...
Background:
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the leading causes of cancer death in the United States. The incidence and prevalence of CRC have historically increased with age. Although rates of CRC in the United States have been decreasing over the past decades among those aged ≥65 years, there has been an uptick among those in younger age brackets. Google News is one of the biggest traffic drivers to top news sites. It aggregates and shares news highlights from multiple sources worldwide and organizes them by content type. Despite the widespread use of Google News, research is lacking on the type of CRC content represented in this news source.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to analyze content related to CRC screening and prevention in Google News articles published during National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month (March 2022).
Methods:
Data collection for this cross-sectional study was conducted in March 2022-National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. Using the term colorectal cancer, 100 English-language Google News articles were extracted and coded for content. A combined approach-deductive and inductive coding-was utilized. Descriptive analyses were conducted, and frequency distributions were reported. Univariable analyses were performed to assess differences between articles that mentioned CRC screening and those that did not via chi-square tests.
Results:
Of the 100 articles reviewed, nearly half (n=49, 49%) were created by health news organizations, and another 27% (n=27) were created by television news services. The predominant themes in the content included age at the onset of disease (n=59, 59%), mortality related to CRC (n=57, 57%), and the severity of disease (n=50, 50%). Only 18% (n=18) of articles discussed CRC disparities, 23% (n=23) mentioned that there are hereditary forms of the disease, 36% (n=36) spoke of colonoscopy to screen for the disease, and 37% (n=37) mentioned how the disease is treated. Although most articles mentioned CRC screening (n=61, 61%), it was striking that sex was only mentioned in 34% (21/61) of these articles, colonoscopy was mentioned in 46% (28/61), and diet was mentioned in 30% (18/61).
Conclusions:
Heightening the public's awareness of this disease is important, but it is critical that messages related to how preventable this cancer is, who is the most likely to develop CRC, and what can be done to detect it in the early stages when the disease is the most curable be the critical elements of dialogue, particularly during National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. There is a need to disseminate information about early-onset CRC and the importance of screening, especially among populations with low rates of uptake. Web-based news is potentially an underutilized communication mechanism for promoting CRC screenings as secondary prevention measures for high-risk groups.
... La Ecuación General de Distribución de Recursos en Equidad propuesta y verificada experimentalmente en esta investigación provee de las reglas normativas para maximizar la equidad (Herrnstein, 1990) entre los agentes de una sociedad. En ese mismo sentido los países con los mayores niveles de desarrollo le han apostado a la política pública basada en evidencia científica (Head, 2008(Head, , 2010 los campos de aplicación del conocimiento derivados de la psicología, economía conductual y experimental son diversos desde la pobreza (Hall, 2008), finanzas del hogar (Giné, Xavier & Mazer 2014), productividad (Ashraf, Bandiera, & Lee 2014), promoción de la salud (Ayers et al., 2014) y cambio climático (Kahan et al., 2011) y por supuesto la abundante evidencia recolectada por Thaler y Sunstein (2021) y Thaler (2015) sobre el comportamiento irracional en la vida económica. Desde la investigación puente (Mace & Critchfield, 2010) resulta valioso pues se podrían verificar los hallazgos del laboratorio en la distribución de recursos de manera más justa, ética y equitativa. ...
Los modelos de equidad han predicho adecuadamente las ganancias monetarias entre dos empleados hipotéticos que difieren en méritos, sin embargo, han sido incapaces de predecir pérdidas monetarias y condiciones de n>2; se propone la Ecuación General de Distribución de Recursos En Equidad (Función de Equidad) para superar dichas limitantes por lo que el objetivo de la presente investigación consistió en evaluar la generalidad de la Función de Equidad en contextos de pérdidas y ganancias. Participaron voluntariamente 30 estudiantes universitarios de los cuales el 65% fueron mujeres tenían 19.87 años (DE=1.23). En 18 escenarios hipotéticos de acuerdo con un diseño de medidas repetidas (3 niveles de mérito de A) X 3 (niveles de mérito de B) x 2 (Ganancias y Pérdidas) los participantes asignaron montos en ganancias y pérdidas monetarias. Se encontraron reglas de integración aditiva en el campo de las ganancias e indicios de reglas de integración multiplicativa en el campo de las pérdidas. La Ecuación General de Distribución de Recursos en Equidad predice adecuadamente los montos en ganancias y pérdidas. Los datos se discuten a la luz de la Teoría de Integración de Información y las Ciencias Cognitivas y del Comportamiento.
... This phenomenon can generate increases in search trends greater than those produced by awareness campaigns. This was demonstrated in the cases of Angelina Jolie and Steve Jobs [18,19], and it may account for the search trends peak observed in November 2017 in Spain and worldwide following media coverage of the diagnosis of prostate cancer at 48 years of age of Latin American ex-football player Eduardo Berizzo [20]. ...
Objective: To evaluate the impact of the “Movember” awareness campaign (men’s health campaign that takes place every November) on internet search trends for information online about prostate cancer and to compare the results with those for “Pinktober” (the breast cancer awareness campaign that takes place in October) in the Spanish language as an indirect measure of its effectiveness.
Methods: Google Trends was used to evaluate the monthly relative search volumes (RSV) of the terms “cáncer de próstata” (prostate cancer), “cáncer de mama” (breast cancer), and “Movember” from January 2009 to December 2019 both in Spain and worldwide (in the Spanish language). Breast cancer was used as a comparator of the campaign impact. Mean increase in RSV on-campaign and off-campaign was calculated and compared using the Mann-Whitney U test and Joinpoint regression analysis to assess loss or gain of interest.
Results: The term “cáncer de próstata” showed a statistically significant increase during the campaign months both in Spain (17.4%; P < 0.001) and worldwide (35.4%; P < 0.001). Both “cáncer de próstata” and Movember showed a decreasing trend worldwide and in Spain, while “cáncer de mama” showed an increasing trend.
Conclusion: The Movember campaign generates a statistically significant increase in the search trends on “cancer de próstata” (prostate cancer) during the month of November (both in Spain and worldwide); when compared with the breast cancer campaign “Pinktober” these increases are of a lesser magnitude but still significant, suggesting that the campaign is effective beyond the English language, although the interest has been decreasing throughout the years
... In other previous studies, this association had been approved (Effenberger et al., 2020;Higgins et al., 2020;Husain et al., 2020;Mavragani, 2020;Rajan et al., 2020;Sousa-Pinto et al., 2020). Some other researches indicated that Google Trends has the undeniable potential to map the information-seeking behavior of the users over the period (Ayers, Althouse, Noar, & Cohen, 2014;Brigo et al., 2014;Kuehn, 2013;Otte, van Diessen, Bell, & Sander, 2013;Pelat, Turbelin, Bar-Hen, Flahault, & Valleron, 2009;Van Campen et al., 2014;Willard & Nguyen, 2013). ...
The spread of COVID-19 has created a fundamental need for coordinated mechanisms responding to outbreaks in different sectors. One of the main sectors relates to information supply and demand in the middle of this pandemic in the digital environment. It could be called infodemiology. It is known as a promising approach to solving the challenge in the present age. At this level, the purpose of this article is to investigate the COVID-19 related search process by field research. Data were retrieved from Google Trends in Middle Eastern countries alongside scientific research output of Middle Eastern scientists towards COVID-19 in Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed. Daily COVID-19 cases and deaths were retrieved from the World Health Organization. We searched for descriptive statistical analyses to detect coronavirus-seeking behavior versus coronavirus releases in the Middle East in 2020. Findings show that people in the Middle East use various keyword solutions to search for COVID-19 in Google. There is a significant correlation between coronavirus confirmed cases and scientific productivity (January 2020-December 2020). Also, there is a positive association between the number of deaths and the number of scientific publications (except Jordan). It was a positive and significant association between online coronavirus-seeking behavior on Google (RSVs) and the confirmed cases (except Syria and Yemen). Furthermore, it was a positive relationship between RSVs and scientific productivity in the Middle East (except Bahrain and Qatar). From an infodemiological viewpoint, there is a significant correlation between coronavirus information demand and its information provision.
... A lo largo de la historia, cuando un personaje célebre es afectado por esta neoplasia, cualquiera que sea su localización, diferentes medios, según el momento histórico, retoman con ímpetu los temas de factores de riesgo, métodos de prevención y de diagnóstico temprano. Recientemente sucedió esto con el expresidente del Brasil Ignacio Lulla da Silva, quien fue diagnosticado con cáncer glótico asociado a intenso tabaquismo y fue tratado exitosamente con radioterapia 4 . Esos momentos han sido útiles para, en forma masiva, hacer del conocimiento de la población los hábitos que se asocian al desarrollo de esta terrible neoplasia, a la mejor forma de prevenirla y en muchas ocasiones, como veremos a lo largo del texto, señalar a los profesionales los errores y aciertos de los tratamientos y enfocar las baterías a blancos específicos de tratamiento. ...
Head and neck cancer is one of the first ten malignancies, the survivor’s sequelae impact on their work and intellectual development, the risk of suffering it is related to lifestyle, habits, and poisonings. Consuming alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine increases the risk, the intensity is related to the prognosis. Timely diagnosis is the best way to achieve success in treatment; in theory, having such a close relationship with lifestyle would favor the diagnosis of early stages, but this is not the case; Despite health promotion campaigns, even in subjects at risk, the population does not create awareness of the disease. When celebrities, celebrities or public figures are diagnosed in this neoplasm, it has been observed that awareness increases and risk factors are discussed, sometimes this event favors the creation of foundations for patient support. This manuscript analyzes which celebrities have suffered from this neoplasm and who in some way or another, has promoted a change in attitude and has pointed out the importance of health promotion in the diagnostic process of head and neck cancer.
... Celebrities, like Hanks, have long been studied for their potential impact on public health (e.g., Brown and Basil, 1995;Cohen and Hoffner, 2016;Myrick et al., 2014). When media discuss a celebrity's illness, the audience's relationship with the celebrity can shape health attitudes, intentions, and behaviors (Ayers et al., 2014;Brown and Basil, 2010;Noar et al., 2014). The overarching research question we aim to address in the present study is how news of a popular celebrity contracting COVID-19 may spark a myriad of emotional, cognitive, and communication-oriented responses in audiences that, in turn, may shape subsequent COVID-19-related prevention activities. ...
Rationale
On March 11, 2020, actor Tom Hanks announced via social media that he had been diagnosed with COVID-19. Previous research has found celebrity illness disclosures to influence behavior, but during the uncertainty of a pandemic, the effects of such a disclosure were unclear.
Objective
To test the proposed Celebrity Illness Disclosure Effects (CIDE) model, demonstrating how an illness disclosure, communicated through mediated and interpersonal channels, may shape willingness to engage in prevention behaviors.
Methods
We conducted an online survey (N = 587) 24 hours after Hanks’ COVID-19 disclosure.
Results
Findings revealed that celebrity-related variables predicted illness-related variables, which were associated with willingness to enact prevention behaviors. Greater willingness to seek information, stronger perceptions of COVID as a threat, and stronger perceptions of efficacy for dealing with COVID after learning of Hanks’ diagnosis predicted stronger willingness to enact prevention behaviors. However, anxiety about COVID predicted lower willingness to enact prevention behaviors.
Conclusions
The CIDE model can serve as a guide for future research in this area. The results can help scholars who aim to better understand the phenomena around celebrities and health communication as well as policymakers who hope to ride the wave of star power to improved public health outcomes.
... However, web searches have also been analysed to describe public attention in relation to a public health issue. In the area of non-communicable diseases, studies can be found that examine public attention to preventive measures such as cancer screening or smoking cessation [24][25][26][27] . In the area of infectious diseases, studies mainly examine public attention to the disease itself 9,28-31 , but further examine attention to specific prevention measures [32][33][34][35] . ...
Risk communication during pandemics is an element of utmost importance. Understanding the level of public attention—a prerequisite for effective communication—implicates expensive and time-consuming surveys. We hypothesise that the relative search volume from Google Trends could be used as an indicator of public attention of a disease and its prevention measures. The search terms ‘RKI’ (Robert Koch Institute, national public health authority in Germany), ‘corona’ and ‘protective mask’ in German language were shortlisted. Cross-correlations between these terms and the reported cases from 15 February to 27 April were conducted for each German federal state. The findings were contrasted against a timeline of official communications concerning COVID-19. The highest correlations of the term ‘RKI’ with reported COVID-19 cases were found between lags of − 2 and − 12 days, meaning web searches were already performed from 2 to 12 days before case numbers increased. A similar pattern was seen for the term ‘corona’. Cross-correlations indicated that most searches on ‘protective mask’ were performed from 6 to 12 days after the peak of cases. The results for the term ‘protective mask’ indicate a degree of confusion in the population. This is supported by conflicting recommendations to wear face masks during the first wave. The relative search volumes could be a useful tool to provide timely and location-specific information on public attention for risk communication.
... Até recentemente, o estudo das oscilações de termos de busca era empregado unicamente pelos especialistas em marketing, com fins mercadológicos, a fim de identificar tendências de consumo de produtos em associações colaterais com elementos da cultura. No entanto, o assim categorizado "comportamento de buscas" tem também se mostrado útil no delineamento de séries temporais que indicam ciclos de interesse coletivo (CIC) impulsionados por modas, boa-tos, material jornalístico e, sobretudo, pelo comportamento de celebridades influenciadoras [27][28][29][30] . Embora de valor escasso na análise qualitativa de significados socialmente construídos, é sensível a influências ligadas a temas de interesse da saúde coletiva, no papel de marcadores de fenômenos culturais efêmeros e, portanto, subdimensionados [31][32][33][34][35] . ...
Resumo Este trabalho objetivou descrever e analisar conteúdos de notícias associadas a ciclos de buscas ao Google ligados a 8 tipos de dieta: a cetogênica; da lua; da proteína; da sopa; detox; dos pontos; paleo; e Dukan. Estas foram selecionadas por terem sido apontadas pelo Google Trends® (GT) como as mais frequentemente associadas ao termo dieta. Os conteúdos dos sites vinculados aos maiores picos de buscas foram apontados pelo Google News®. O volume de buscas às dietas foram estimados pelo GT com filtros de região (Brasil) e temática (Saúde) considerando o período de 01/01/2012 a 01/01/2017. Os acessos retratam ciclos efêmeros com centenas de picos e quedas de interesse pelas 8 dietas da moda. A ênfase se concentra nas orientações para rápida perda de peso em prol de um ideal de saúde tido como proxy de um ideal estético. A dimensão dos riscos associados às dietas mais restritivas é citada frequentemente e validada por informações de especialistas. Destaca-se a exposição e a influência da opinião de celebridades relatando suas experiências dietéticas. Ao contrário do ideal de variedade e equilíbrio, as dietas da moda retratam a pressão pelo autocontrole alimentar como recurso à construção de um corpo idealizado e tipificado por imagens das celebridades.
... However, considering the scale and breadth of populations GPHDs aim to reach, by approaching the specific health needs of population subsets in a culturally appropriate way GPHDs could achieve much greater impact [46]. In Brazil and the USA celebrity disclosure of disease diagnoses have had a larger impact on OHISB and health behaviour than the GPHDs dedicated to the health concern in question [40,47]. Using concrete examples from within the population in question could be the first step towards creating greater and more sustained impact on health awareness. ...
Background:
Public health awareness can help prevent illness and result in earlier intervention when it does occur. For this reason, health promotion and disease awareness campaigns have great potential to alleviate the global burden of disease. Global Public Health Days (GPHD) are frequently implemented with this intent, but research evaluating their effectiveness, especially in the developing world setting, is scant.
Objectives:
We aimed to evaluate the impact of four GPHDs (World Cancer Day, World Diabetes Day, World Mental Health Day, World AIDS Day) on online health information seeking behaviour (OHISB) in five Central and South American (CSA) countries which differ in their stage of economic development and epidemiological transition (Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua).
Methods:
Google Trends data was used as a 'surrogate' of OHISB. This was measured on the 28 days leading up to the GPHD, on the date of the GPHD, and on the seven days following it. The Joinpoint regression programme was used to perform a time trend analysis on the Google Trends data. This allowed us to identify statistically significant time points of a change in trend, which reflect significant 'changes' to OHISB.
Results:
GPHDs were inconsistently effective at influencing internet search query activity in the studied countries. In situations where an effect was significant, this impact was consistently short-term, with Relative Search Volume level returning to precampaign levels within 7 days of the GPHD.
Conclusions:
Our findings imply the need to revise GPHDs or create alternative health awareness campaigns, perhaps with a more long-term approach and tailored to the specific health needs of the CSA population. Developing effective preventive strategies is vital in helping combat the rising threat of NCDs in this region.
... Information, promoting actions, and reminders have been found to be the most influential methods of increasing breast cancer screening compliance [32,33]. Furthermore, healthy patients who have fewer interactions with the medical community may rely more on popular media, in which messages are often contradictory regarding the benefits and harms of breast cancer screening [3,34,35]. ...
Objective:
To evaluate the impact of comorbid conditions and age on mammography use.
Methods:
We used data from the 2011 to 2015 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which contained records for 40,752 women over the age of 40. Use was defined as a mammogram within the previous 1 or 2 years, analyzed separately. A logit model was employed to evaluate associations between use and comorbidities and age. Statistical significance was defined by a P value < .05 by two-sided test.
Results:
Of the 36,575 women in our study sample, 45.9%, 43.6%, 3.9%, and 5.7% reported a history of hypertension (HTN), hyperlipidemia (HLD), prior heart attack (MI), and prior stroke, respectively. Among women without a comorbid condition, there was 47.3% annual mammography use. HTN and HLD were associated with increased use (2.5 and 6.8 percentage points [pp], P< .01). In comparison, prior MI was associated with decreased annual use (-8.2 pp, P < .01). Prior stroke was not significantly associated with annual mammography (-1.5 pp, P = .42). Results were similar for biennial use. The age trend in use showed that the age with maximum screening use was approximately 60 years.
Discussion:
Mammography use was higher in patients with HTN and HLD, and lower in patients with prior MI and stroke, which may reflect differences in comorbidity-related general health care use. Use increased until it peaked around age 60. An understanding of how mammography use naturally evolves as people age may help better target specific populations and improve overall use of preventive care.
... Several studies have shown that information seeking, cancer screening, and primary prevention are influenced by celebrity narratives of cancer care. 11,13,[17][18][19][20] However, these studies did not measure the fear and psychological distress that also might accompany excessive screening or drastic unnecessary medical procedures. Furthermore, we know that patients with advanced cancer who do not understand their prognosis are more likely to choose aggressive treatments instead of considering treatments that might better subserve their quality of life. ...
Despite the prodigious medical literature on cancer care, some patients rely on celebrity narratives as frameworks for understanding their experiences of cancer and as benchmarks for decision making. Regardless of whether these narratives are appropriate sources of health information for patients, it has been shown that celebrity narratives influence patterns of care. Three cases-John McCain, Angelina Jolie, and Jimmy Carter-are presented to illustrate how media coverage of cancer can have unforeseen consequences on individual patients exposed to these kinds of stories. For this reason, clinicians should become familiar with these narratives and comfortable with discussing how celebrity narratives can shape patients' views and decisions.
... Even so, much has been learned from media monitoring, including the tobacco industry's role in independent military newspapers [20], popular perceptions of tobacco policies [21][22][23][24], and support for tobacco control in the news [25]. Moreover, several studies have relied on simple keyword-based media monitoring to inform tobacco control program evaluations and designs [26][27][28][29]. By making expansive media monitoring feasible (i.e., our study encompasses more news reports than the entire history of tobacco control media monitoring to date)the potential for even more impactful discoveries in the future is increased. ...
News media monitoring is an important scientific tool. By treating news reporters as data collectors and their reports as qualitative accounts of a fast changing public health landscape, researchers can glean many valuable insights. Yet, there have been surprisingly few innovations in public health media monitoring, with nearly all studies relying on labor-intensive content analyses limited to a small number of media reports. We propose to advance this subfield by using scalable machine learning. In potentially the largest contemporary public health media monitoring study to date, we systematically characterize global news reports surrounding electronic cigarettes or electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) using natural language processing techniques. News reports including ENDS terms (e.g., “electronic cigarettes”) from over 100,000 sources (all sources archived on Google News or Bing News, as well as all news articles shared on Twitter) were monitored for 1 January 2013 through 31 July 2018. The geographic and subject (e.g., prevalence, bans, quitting, warnings, marketing, prices, age, flavor and industry) foci of news articles, their popularity among readers who share news on social media, and the sentiment behind news articles were assessed algorithmically. Globally there were 86,872 ENDS news reports with coverage increasing from 8 (standard deviation [SD] = 8) stories per day in 2013 to 75 (SD = 56) stories per day during 2018. The focus of ENDS news spanned 148 nations, with the plurality focusing on the United States (34% of all news). Potentially overlooked hotspots of ENDS media activity included China, Egypt, Russia, Ukraine, and Paraguay. The most common subject was warnings about ENDS (18%), followed by bans on using ENDS (13%) and ENDS prices (9%). Flavor and age restrictions were the least covered news subjects (~1% each). Among different subject foci, reports on quitting cigarettes using ENDS had the highest probability of scoring in the top three deciles of popularity rankings. Moreover, ENDS news on quitting and prices had a more positive sentiment on average than news with other subject foci. Public health leaders can use these trends to stay abreast of how ENDS are portrayed in the media, and potentially how the public perceives ENDS. Because our analytical strategies are updated in near real time, we aim to make media monitoring part of standard practice to support evidence-based tobacco control in the future.
... Google Trends analyzes a subset of daily Google search queries and provides data on temporal and geospatial patterns in search volumes for userinputted terms (Google, 2017b). Google Trends holds considerable potential for deriving meaningful insights from public search behavior (Nuti et al., 2014), and has been used in variety of studies including those related to disease (Ginsberg et al., 2009;Fenichel et al., 2013;Kostkova et al., 2013), tobacco use (Ayers, 2011a(Ayers, , b, 2012, suicide and mental health (McCarthy, 2010;Gunn and Lester, 2013), sexual behavior (Markey and Markey, 2013), and cancer (Glynn et al., 2011;Ayers, 2014). ...
Systems for monitoring population-level diet and nutritional intake have been considered insufficient across many countries. Recently, internet search query data have been used to examine spatial and temporal patterns of public behavior to inform public-health campaigns, policies, and interventions. Seasonal trends in public interest in behavioral change associated with obesity have been documented using such data. However, it has not been validated whether search query data can be related to diet and nutritional intake at the population level. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether trends in search query data related to behavioral changes associated with obesity reflects population nutritional intake and dieting behavior. First, long-term (2004 to 2016) trends in Australian Google search behavior were examined for the terms “weight loss”, “diet”, and “fitness” to establish monthly patterns in relative search volume (RSV). Second, monthly total energy (kJ), macronutrient, and food intake of the Australian population, and the percentage of self-reported dieters, were quantified using data collected as part of a 2011–2012 national-level survey. The two independent data sets were then compared to ascertain similarities in trends. There were distinct patterns in RSV across months, which was significantly higher than the mean during January, and lower during December, for all search terms. The decline in RSV was not linear, however, as there were significantly lower RSVs for terms during May to July, and significantly higher from August to October. Likewise, nutritional data showed a seasonal pattern, with the energy intake of survey participants highest in December and lowest in February, and the percentage of self-reported dieters closely followed monthly patterns in RSV. The proportion of energy from protein was consistent across months examined; however, energy from lipid and carbohydrate + fiber, was variable between months. Likewise, consumption patterns of different food groups was variable across months. Our analysis suggests that search query data can be used to surveil and predict dietary behavior at the population level, which has implications for producing novel and contemporaneous health information and marketing strategies.
... Given the participatory nature of social media, it is likely that more of these kinds of events will occur in the future. Digital surveillance methods are needed to quantify the effects of such events ( Noar et al., 2013;Ayers et al., 2014a;Ayers et al., 2014b), which may not be Fig. 2. News and Search Query Volume before and after TW's Post. Note: Panel A is news volume; Panel B is all skin cancer search queries; Panel C is skin cancer and prevention queries; and Panel D is skin cancer and tanning queries (Note: Bar graphs on right are on different scales. ...
Social media may provide new opportunities to promote skin cancer prevention, but research to understand this potential is needed. In April of 2015, Kentucky native Tawny Willoughby (TW) shared a graphic skin cancer selfie on Facebook that subsequently went viral. We examined the volume of comments and shares of her original Facebook post; news volume of skin cancer from Google News; and search volume for skin cancer Google queries. We compared these latter metrics after TWs announcement against expected volumes based on forecasts of historical trends. TW's skin cancer selfie went viral on May 11, 2015 after the social media post had been shared approximately 50,000 times. All search queries for skin cancer increased 162% (95% CI 102 to 320) and 155% (95% CI 107 to 353) on May 13th and 14th, when news about TW's skin cancer selfie was at its peak, and remained higher through May 17th. Google searches about skin cancer prevention and tanning were also significantly higher than expected volumes. In practical terms, searches reached near-record levels - i.e., May 13th, 14th and 15th were respectively the 6th, 8th, and 40th most searched days for skin cancer since January 1, 2004 when Google began tracking searches. We conclude that an ordinary person's social media post caught the public's imagination and led to significant increases in public engagement with skin cancer prevention. Digital surveillance methods can rapidly detect these events in near real time, allowing public health practitioners to engage and potentially elevate positive effects.
... This may caused the growth of searches on Google during this time and increased the sensitivity of Iranian people. Earlier researchers (Ayers et al., 2014, Brigo et al., 2014 reported the effect of famous celebrities on public's concern and anxiety about different diseases. If public health announcement and TV health reports had not focused on stomach cancer during 9 Nov 2014 to 7 Dec 2014, then the leveles of anxiety might be decreased. ...
Based on Eysenbach's view, infodemiology can be defined as the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy. The current study aimed to investigate the state of health information supply and demand on stomach cancer among Iranian medical researchers and Iranian web users during 2011 to 2015. A mixed method research was conducted in this study. In qualitative part, a focus group interview was applied to the users to identify their selected keywords searched for stomach cancer on Google. The collected data were analyzed using Open Code software. In quantitative part, data were synthesized using R software in two parts. First, users' Internet information seeking behavior (ISB) was analyzed using Google Trends outputs during 2011 to 2015. Second, the scientific publication behavior (SPB) of Iranian stomach cancer specialists was surveyed using PubMed during the period of the study. Eight keywords extracted by focus group interview were entered in the "Google Trends" main page. The results showed that the search volume index of preferred keywords on stomach cancer have increased from 475 in 2011 to 879 in 2015. Also, the findings revealed that Iranian scholars had 194 scientific papers on stomach cancer in PubMed during 2011 to 2015. There was a significant and positive relationship between Iranian ISB in the Google Trends and SPB of Iranian scholars on stomach cancer in PubMed. From infodemiological viewpoint, it has been elucidated that the alignment of ISB and SPB in medical studies can illustrate the purposefulness of these investigations. © 2017, Shohreh SeyyedHosseini, Asefeh Asemi, Ahmad Shabani and Mozafar CheshmehSohrabi.
سید حسینی، شهره، عاصمی، عاصفه (نویسنده مسوول)، شعبانی، احمد و چشمه سهرابی، مظفر (1396). رفتار اطلاع يابي كاربران در مقابل رفتار توليدات علمي پژوهشگران: مطالعه اينفودميولوژيك در حوزه سرطان پروستات. تعامل انسان و اطلاعات. 4 (1). 67-79. http://hii.khu.ac.ir/article-1-2672-fa.pdf
... Therefore, the Japanese heat-not-burn market may be advantaged by being the only noncombustible novel alternative to cigarette smoking. Last, some may question the use of search query trends, however, these data presaged the global rise of electronic cigarettes [1][2], have produced actionable insights across tobacco control that presage traditional data or fill data gaps [19][20][21][22], and search query trends for tobacco have been validated against survey based criterion [23]. ...
Heat-not-burn tobacco products, battery powered devices that heat leaf tobacco to approximately 500 degrees Fahrenheit to produce an inhalable aerosol, are being introduced in markets around the world. Japan, where manufacturers have marketed several heat-not-burn brands since 2014, has been the focal national test market, with the intention of developing global marketing strategies. We used Google search query data to estimate, for the first time, the scale and growth potential of heat-not-burn tobacco products. Average monthly searches for heat-not-burn products rose 1,426% (95%CI: 746,3574) between their first (2015) and second (2016) complete years on the market and an additional 100% (95%CI: 60, 173) between the products second (2016) and third years on the market (Jan-Sep 2017). There are now between 5.9 and 7.5 million heat-not-burn related Google searches in Japan each month based on September 2017 estimates. Moreover, forecasts relying on the historical trends suggest heat-not-burn searches will increase an additional 32% (95%CI: -4 to 79) during 2018, compared to current estimates for 2017 (Jan-Sep), with continued growth thereafter expected. Contrasting heat-not-burn’s rise in Japan to electronic cigarettes’ rise in the United States we find searches for heat-not-burn eclipsed electronic cigarette searches during April 2016. Moreover, the change in average monthly queries for heat-not-burn in Japan between 2015 and 2017 was 399 (95% CI: 184, 1490) times larger than the change in average monthly queries for electronic cigarettes in the Unites States over the same time period, increasing by 2,956% (95% CI: 1729, 7304) compared to only 7% (95% CI: 3,13). Our findings are a clarion call for tobacco control leaders to ready themselves as heat-not-burn tobacco products will likely garner substantial interest as they are introduced into new markets. Public health practitioners should expand heat-not-burn tobacco product surveillance, adjust existing tobacco control strategies to account for heat-not-burn tobacco products, and preemptively study the health risks/benefits, popular perceptions, and health messaging around heat-not-burn tobacco products.
... Accurate behavioral surveillance of chronic diseases is a well-known challenge in healthcare 35 . Emerging data streams, also known as novel data streams (NDS) and alternative data (AD), comprising such signals as web search histories, social media updates or another user-generated content (UGC) are considered to hold promise for enhancing the capabilities of public health surveillance 28,29,35,36 . ...
Recent studies demonstrate that people are increasingly looking online to assess their health, with reasons varying from personal preferences and beliefs to inability to book a timely appointment with their local medical practice. Records of these activities represent a new source of data about the health of populations, but which is currently unaccounted for by disease surveillance models. This could potentially be useful as evidence of individuals’ perception of bodily changes and self-diagnosis of early symptoms of an emerging disease. We make use of the Experian geodemographic Mosaic dataset in order to extract Type 2 diabetes candidate risk variables and compare their temporal relationships with the search keywords, used to describe early symptoms of the disease on Google. Our results demonstrate that Google Trends can detect early signs of diabetes by monitoring combinations of keywords, associated with searches for hypertension treatment and poor living conditions; Combined search semantics, related to obesity, how to quit smoking and improve living conditions (deprivation) can be also employed, however, may lead to less accurate results.
... Similar shifts in public attention, where media coverage drives search volume, have been observed with other public health phenomena, such as celebrity cancer diagnoses. 6 These peaks may pose a public health worry, given that increased Internet search volumes may lead to widespread knowledge and subsequent use. Notable in this respect is that one study found that 52.7% of AAS users buy them on the Internet. ...
... To the best of our knowledge, very few have been published on this issue. For example, Leas and collaborators found that Leonardo DiCaprio's 2016 Oscar acceptance speech, in which the actor spoke also about climate [26]. ...
Autoimmune disorders impose a high burden, in terms of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Vasculitis is an autoimmune disorder that causes inflammation and destruction of blood vessels. Harold Allen Ramis, a famous American actor, director, writer, and comedian, died on the February 24, 2014, of complications of an autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis. To investigate the relation between interests and awareness of an autoimmune disease after a relevant event such as the death of a celebrity, we systematically mined Google Trends, Wikitrends, Google News, YouTube, and Twitter, in any language, from their inception until October 31, 2016. Twenty-eight thousand eight hundred fifty-two tweets; 4,133,615 accesses to Wikipedia; 6780 news; and 11,400 YouTube videos were retrieved, processed, and analyzed. The Harold Ramis death of vasculitis resulted into an increase in vasculitis-related Google searches, Wikipedia page accesses, and tweet production, documenting a peak in February 2014. No trend could be detected concerning uploading YouTube videos. The usage of Big Data is promising in the fields of immunology and rheumatology. Clinical practitioners should be aware of this emerging phenomenon.
... These sources have also been used to rapidly respond to emerging infectious diseases, such as dengue fever [4] and Zika [16,42,29], and Ebola [41,20]. Big media data has yielded new insights into behavioral aspects of public health, including public responses to planned communication campaigns [2,11,6], awareness campaigns, [13,8,57,33] and organic/spontaneous events, such as a celebrity health disclosure [39,10,52,53,12]. Online resources are also helping to fight the current opioid epidemic [36], as well as studies that track emerging drugs [38] and measure drug prevalence [58]. ...
The scientific method drives improvements in public health, but a strategy of obstructionism has impeded scientists from gathering even a minimal amount of information to address America's gun violence epidemic. We argue that in spite of a lack of federal investment, large amounts of publicly available data offer scientists an opportunity to measure a range of firearm-related behaviors. Given the diversity of available data - including news coverage, social media, web forums, online advertisements, and Internet searches (to name a few) - there are ample opportunities for scientists to study everything from trends in particular types of gun violence to gun-related behaviors (such as purchases and safety practices) to public understanding of and sentiment towards various gun violence reduction measures. Science has been sidelined in the gun violence debate for too long. Scientists must tap the big media data stream and help resolve this crisis.
... Alongside DiCaprio there are several newly discovered cases showing that organic advocacy —emanating from celebrities and ordinary citizens—have a reach that is greater than virtually any planned media campaign. The most significant smoking-cessation-promoting event in Brazil was when Brazilian President Lula disclosed his laryngeal cancer diagnosis which he attributed to smoking [13] . Angelina Jolie's editorial in The New York Times disclosing her prophylactic double mastectomy corresponded with record levels of news and Google searches for breast cancer, increases that presaged amplified breast cancer screening and prevention [14,15] . ...
... Alongside DiCaprio there are several newly discovered cases showing that organic advocacy -emanating from celebrities and ordinary citizens-have a reach that is greater than virtually any planned media campaign. The most significant smoking-cessation-promoting event in Brazil was when Brazilian President Lula disclosed his laryngeal cancer diagnosis which he attributed to smoking [13]. Angelina Jolie's editorial in The New York Times disclosing her prophylactic double mastectomy corresponded with record levels of news and Google searches for breast cancer, increases that presaged amplified breast cancer screening and prevention [14,15]. ...
The strategies that experts have used to share information about social causes have historically been top-down, meaning the most influential messages are believed to come from planned events and campaigns. However, more people are independently engaging with social causes today than ever before, in part because online platforms allow them to instantaneously seek, create, and share information. In some cases this “organic advocacy” may rival or even eclipse top-down strategies. Big data analytics make it possible to rapidly detect public engagement with social causes by analyzing the same platforms from which organic advocacy spreads. To demonstrate this claim we evaluated how Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 Oscar acceptance speech citing climate change motivated global English language news (Bloomberg Terminal news archives), social media (Twitter postings) and information seeking (Google searches) about climate change. Despite an insignificant increase in traditional news coverage (54%; 95%CI: -144 to 247), tweets including the terms “climate change” or “global warming” reached record highs, increasing 636% (95%CI: 573–699) with more than 250,000 tweets the day DiCaprio spoke. In practical terms the “DiCaprio effect” surpassed the daily average effect of the 2015 Conference of the Parties (COP) and the Earth Day effect by a factor of 3.2 and 5.3, respectively. At the same time, Google searches for “climate change” or “global warming” increased 261% (95%CI, 186–335) and 210% (95%CI 149–272) the day DiCaprio spoke and remained higher for 4 more days, representing 104,190 and 216,490 searches. This increase was 3.8 and 4.3 times larger than the increases observed during COP’s daily average or on Earth Day. Searches were closely linked to content from Dicaprio’s speech (e.g., “hottest year”), as unmentioned content did not have search increases (e.g., “electric car”). Because these data are freely available in real time our analytical strategy provides substantial lead time for experts to detect and participate in organic advocacy while an issue is salient. Our study demonstrates new opportunities to detect and aid agents of change and advances our understanding of communication in the 21st century media landscape.
... It has to be noted that other public health surveillance gaps are already being filled by big data's inexpensive, fine-grained, and real-time capabilities, especially in cases where little or no traditional data exist [5][6][7]. However, to date, big data have rarely been applied to studying health communication campaigns [8][9][10][11][12][13][14], or even health communication research more broadly [15][16][17][18]. The few studies harnessing big data have often relied on a single outcome, such as Internet search queries, and loosely interpreted these outcomes in the absence of any framework for campaign evaluations. ...
Background
Awareness campaigns are ubiquitous, but little is known about their potential effectiveness because traditional evaluations are often unfeasible. For 40 years, the “Great American Smokeout” (GASO) has encouraged media coverage and popular engagement with smoking cessation on the third Thursday of November as the nation’s longest running awareness campaign.
Objective
We proposed a novel evaluation framework for assessing awareness campaigns using the GASO as a case study by observing cessation-related news reports and Twitter postings, and cessation-related help seeking via Google, Wikipedia, and government-sponsored quitlines.
Methods
Time trends (2009-2014) were analyzed using a quasi-experimental design to isolate spikes during the GASO by comparing observed outcomes on the GASO day with the simulated counterfactual had the GASO not occurred.
Results
Cessation-related news typically increased by 61% (95% CI 35-87) and tweets by 13% (95% CI −21 to 48) during the GASO compared with what was expected had the GASO not occurred. Cessation-related Google searches increased by 25% (95% CI 10-40), Wikipedia page visits by 22% (95% CI −26 to 67), and quitline calls by 42% (95% CI 19-64). Cessation-related news media positively coincided with cessation tweets, Internet searches, and Wikipedia visits; for example, a 50% increase in news for any year predicted a 28% (95% CI −2 to 59) increase in tweets for the same year. Increases on the day of the GASO rivaled about two-thirds of a typical New Year’s Day—the day that is assumed to see the greatest increases in cessation-related activity. In practical terms, there were about 61,000 more instances of help seeking on Google, Wikipedia, or quitlines on GASO each year than would normally be expected.
Conclusions
These findings provide actionable intelligence to improve the GASO and model how to rapidly, cost-effectively, and efficiently evaluate hundreds of awareness campaigns, nearly all for the first time.
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to analyze the effectiveness of health advertisements during the pandemic that used different message appeals. Which appeals do individuals give more attention to and help them change behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on empirical investigation, an online survey was developed to measure the proposed model. The reliability and validity of the reflective constructs were conducted using Cronbach’s alpha and Pearson product-moment correlations in SPSS.
Findings
Our results show that consumer (people) engagement is dependent on advertisements that involve threat, fear, animation and testimonials, which are all part of the persuasion route.
Practical implications
The findings of this study can help marketers and health professionals organize advertising campaigns effectively. Attractive (effective) messages mean that the messages content is perceived as more credible and memorable, and people give attention and finally influence consumers (people’s) judgment, beliefs, involvement and preferences. Moreover, the findings of this study can be used for other social campaigns, like environmental protection public campaigns.
Originality/value
Although there are many primary studies claiming to evaluate the effectiveness of social messages, there have been only a small number to study health change behavior in the short run. The present research tries to cover this gap and more specifically investigates the role of the specific context of the messages in persuasive effects such as consumer (people) engagement with advertisements and brands, in our case, the idea of appropriate health behavior in times of crisis.
Print and online media play a crucial role in shaping public understanding of diseases like prostate cancer (PCa), particularly through reporting on public figures. However, such media coverage can introduce bias by providing incomplete or non-evidence-based information. This study aimed to assess potential bias by applying a standardized rubric to articles discussing PCa in public figures. Articles were sourced from LexisNexis® using the terms “prostate cancer” and the name of a public figure diagnosed with the disease. The study analyzed 147 articles covering 49 public figures, selected based on relevance from top-circulation publications between 1994 and 2024. Of these, 95.9% had unbiased titles, 35.4% included expert quotes, and 27.2% mentioned risk factors such as age, race, and family history. However, 25.9% of the articles exhibited bias supporting PCa screening, and only 16.3% referenced scientific studies. Additionally, among the 45 articles published when shared decision-making (SDM) was the standard of care for screening decisions, only one referenced this concept. Thus, while titles were generally unbiased, statements supporting screening, low rates of scientific referencing, and minimal reference to SDM highlight limitations of this reporting that may bias readers’ understanding of prostate cancer detection and treatment. These findings may provide a window into how reporting on medical conditions in public figures, which can influence readers’ perceptions of disease, can improve in quality and completeness.
Purpose: The present study aimed to evaluate the knowledge and awareness level concerning colorectal cancer epidemiology, risk factors, symptoms, and prevention among young people in Poland. Methods: The knowledge was examined with an anonymous survey between February and March 2021. The data were collected anonymously, and the participation was voluntary. Statistical analysis was performed, and differences were considered significant if the p-value obtained was smaller than the assumed level of significance p ≤0.05. Results: Respondents were mostly female, living in a city with a population of over 500,000. The results confirmed that education, family/friends’ history of CRC, and a place of residence differentiate knowledge and awareness about CRC. Conclusion: The study acquired information that might guide educators about knowledge deficits among young people in Poland. The survey results revealed a significant knowledge gap between rural and urban inhabitants as well as between medical and non-medical groups.
This study aimed to investigate the demand for information from Iranian users to the supply of scientific products to Iranian researchers in the field of the Quran during the years 2011-2020. The present study is a descriptive-analytical done by web research and scientometric methods using infodemiology indicators. The population included the keywords of Iranian users' search in the field of the Qur'an using Google Trends; and in the scientometrics section, the research conducted by Iranian researchers in the area of the Qur'an-indexed in Islamic world citation databases, web of science, and Scopus during the years 2011-2020. A correlation test was performed to investigate the alignment of users 'information retrieval behavior and researchers' scientific products using R software. The number of scientific products of researchers and the index of Iranian users' search volume in the Google search engine has increased over ten years. The average growth of scientific productions of Iranian researchers in the Quranic studies was 411.40. Spearman correlation coefficient between users' information-seeking behavior and scientific products of Iranian researchers in the field of Quran in the sections of Web search (P-value = 0.001), YouTube search (P-value = 0.0001) and the sum of parts of Google search engine (P-value = 0.0001) were obtained meaningfully. Many factors affect the increasing scientific production of Iranian researchers in the Quranic fields. Information demand or Internet information retrieval behavior of users in this subject can be one of the most critical factors.
Background:
We investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on oral cancer (OC), comparing diagnosis and number of pre-operative days in the diagnosis of OC in 2019 (pre COVID-19) and that in 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic).
Methods:
Using data from a cancer registry-based study on the impact of COVID-19 on cancer care in Osaka (CanReCO), we collected details of sex, age, residential area, cancer site, date of diagnosis, clinical stage at first treatment, and number of pre-operative days in OC patients.
Results:
A total of 1,470 OC cases were registered. Incidence of OC before and during COVID-19 was 814 and 656 cases, respectively. During the first wave of the pandemic (March to May 2020), incidence was about half that in the same period in 2019 (2019; n=271, 2020; n=145). Number of pre-operative days (median number of days between first hospital visit and surgery date) was significantly shorter during the COVID-19 year (24.5 days) than in the pre-COVID-19 year (28 days, p=0.0015).
Conclusions:
Incidence of OC during the COVID-19 pandemic was lower than in pre-COVID-19. Despite disruption in the healthcare system, the number of pre-operative days for OC cases was shorter during the pandemic.
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most predominant malignancies among the adult population. Most cases of CRC develop from non-malignant precursor lesions called adenomas over a long time, which provides an opportunity for prevention with screening programmes. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the knowledge and awareness level concerning colorectal cancer epidemiology, risk factors, symptoms, and prevention among young society in Poland. The knowledge was examined with an anonymous survey between February and March 2021. Statistical analysis was performed and differences were considered significant if the p -value obtained was smaller than the assumed level of significance p ≤ 0.05. Respondents were mostly female, living in a city, with a population of over 500 thousand. The study acquired information that might guide educators about knowledge deficit among young society in Poland. The results confirmed that education, family/friends history of CRC and a place of residence differentiate knowledge and awareness about CRC. They revealed a significant knowledge gap between rural and urban inhabitants as well as a medical and non-medical group.
Medialer Kommunikation kommt in verschiedenen Phasen einer Krebserkrankung (Cancer Care Continuum) eine bedeutende Rolle zu. Aus kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Sicht bietet sich eine Systematisierung an, die zwischen 1) medialen Darstellungen von Krebs und deren Wirkungspotenzialen, 2) krebsbezogenem Informationsverhalten sowie 3) krebsbezogenen kommunikativen Interventionen unterscheidet. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick zu diesen Punkten und zeigt Kommunikationsherausforderungen auf.
Grounded in work on health narratives of public figures, an online survey (N = 305) explored amplification of Carrie Fisher’s mental health advocacy following her death through sharing about mental health on SNSs. Parasocial relationship (PSR) to Fisher and grief in response to her death both predicted greater sharing about mental health on social network sites, but parasocial grief fully mediated the influence of PSR on social sharing. Prosocial motivations (pleasure, pressure) moderated the relationship between parasocial grief and social sharing. In a separate analysis, parasocial grief predicted greater exposure to both media about mental health and media that mourned/celebrated Fisher. Mental health-related media exposure mediated the influence of parasocial grief on social sharing, but this mediation occurred only among people who were not aware of Fisher’s mental health advocacy prior to her death.
Social media platforms have the potential to facilitate the dissemination of cancer prevention and control messages following celebrity cancer diagnoses. However, cancer communicators have yet to systematically leverage these naturally occurring interventions on social media as these events are difficult to identify as they are unfolding and little research has analyzed their effect on social media conversations. In this study, we add to the research by analyzing how a celebrity cancer announcement influenced Twitter conversations in terms of the volume of social media messages and the type of content. Over a 9-day period, during which actor Ben Stiller announced that he had been treated for prostate cancer, we collected 1.2 million Twitter messages about cancer. We conducted automated content analyses to identify how often common cancer sites (prostate, breast, colon, or lung) were discussed. Then, we used manual content analysis on a sample of messages to identify cancer continuum content (awareness, prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship, and end of life). Chi-square analyses were implemented to evaluate changes in cancer site and cancer continuum content before and after the announcement. We found that messages related to prostate cancer increased significantly more than expected for 2 days following Stiller's announcement. However, the number of cancer messages that described other cancer locations either did not increase or did not increase by the same magnitude. In terms of message content, results showed larger than expected increases in diagnosis messages. These results suggest opportunities to shape social media conversations following celebrity cancer announcements and increase prevention and early detection messages.
Knowledge and understanding of cancer risk factors in the UK are imperfect, but progress has been made over time in raising awareness of healthy lifestyle choices that can reduce cancer risk, and in changing behaviour. The chapter explores how we can work to raise awareness of cancer prevention and break down barriers to healthy living, and looks at examples of where this has been successful. Sustained, well‐funded campaigns that are appropriately targeted, clear and easy to understand, and come from a trusted source can help to raise awareness. Improving knowledge about cancer prevention is not enough, on its own, to achieve behaviour change, but it is an important first step. Promoting healthy behaviour change to reduce the risk of cancer is critical to stem the rising tide of new cancer cases in the UK, and is a worthwhile investment.
Though the political advertising literature has documented the effects of political advertising on political attitudes and voting behavior, less attention has been paid to the role of political advertising in stimulating information search. This study seeks to examine the impact of political advertising on real world information seeking using CMAG data from the Wisconsin Ad Project combined with Google Trends search data. Results suggest that increased advertising volume is associated with increased online information seeking. Additionally, this study tests the feasibility of using Google Trends search data as a proxy measure of political information seeking.
Background and Aim: The current study aimed to investigate the state of health information
supply and demand on prostate cancer among Iranian medical researchers and Iranian web
users during 2011 to 2015. The purpose of this study, based on infodemiology indicators, was
to investigate the alignment of health information supply and demand on prostate cancer
among Iranian medical researchers and Iranian web users.
Methods: A mixed method research was conducted. In qualitative part, a focus group interview
was applied to the users to identify their selected keywords searched for prostate cancer
in Google. The collected data were analyzed using Open Code software. In quantitative part,
data were synthesized using R software in two parts. First, users’ internet informationseeking
behavior was analyzed using Google Trends outputs during 2011 to 2015. Second,
the scientific publication of Iranian prostate cancer specialists was surveyed using PubMed
during the period of the study.
Results: The results showed that the search volume index of preferred keywords on prostate
cancer have decreased from 2191 in 2011 to 1798 in 2015. Also, the findings revealed that
Iranian scholars had 161 scientific papers on prostate cancer in PubMed during 2011 to 2015.
Among these 161 papers, 20 records related to 2011 and 44 records related to 2015. There
was no significant relationship between users’ information seeking behavior in Google
Trends and the scientific publication behavior of Iranian prostate cancer specialists (p>0.05).
Conclusion: According to the results, when the search volume index of Iranian web users
decreased or increased during the period of the study, the number of scientific publications
had not been affected by users’ search volume. Thus, it can be mentioned that Iranian scholars
had not pay enough attention to the concerns of people toward prostate cancer.
Keywords: Infodemiology, Health information supply, Health information demand, Health
information need.---
Medialer Kommunikation kommt in verschiedenen Phasen einer Krebserkrankung (Cancer Care Continuum) eine bedeutende Rolle zu. Aus kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Sicht bietet sich eine Systematisierung an, die zwischen 1) medialen Darstellungen von Krebs und deren Wirkungspotenzialen, 2) krebsbezogenem Informationsverhalten sowie 3) krebsbezogenen kommunikativen Interventionen unterscheidet. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick zu diesen Punkten und zeigt Kommunikationsherausforderungen auf.
Family presence during resuscitation (FPDR) remains a highly contentious issue among professional caregivers in the acute setting. Generally, even though empirical evidence and professional guidelines support FPDR, healthcare providers instinctively oppose it. The origins of this recalcitrant opposition is likely to be multifold, but the media, which often exposes students of medical professions to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for the first time, may be a significant contributing factor. More specifically, medical dramas play a potential role in the transmission of medical information and etiquette. The objective of the study described here was to examine the way family presence during resuscitation is depicted in current prime-time medical drama TV shows and to compare these to an older prime-time medical drama.
Mass media campaigns that target health behaviour change, such as cancer prevention behaviours, often feature a spokesperson. While commercial marketers tend to focus on the physical and familiar attributes of a spokesperson, in a health context the perceived character and credibility of the spokesperson is expected to have a greater impact on an advertisement’s effectiveness. This two-part study examines the impact of three health spokesperson types (celebrity, medical doctor and celebrity doctor) and their source characteristics (expertise, familiarity) on an audience’s intention to act on preventative cancer advertising messages. The findings from this study contribute to understanding of the role celebrities and medical doctor spokespersons play in influencing an individual to follow health advice.
Corresponding Author: John W. Ayers, PhD, MA, Graduate School of Public Health, San Diego State University, 9245 Sky Park Ct, Ste 230, San Diego, CA 92123 (ayers.john.w@gmail.com).
Published Online: October 28, 2013. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.11933.
Author Contributions: Dr Ayers had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Study concept and design: Ayers, Althouse, Johnson, Cohen.
Acquisition of data: Ayers, Althouse.
Analysis and interpretation of data: Ayers, Althouse, Cohen.
Drafting of the manuscript: Ayers, Althouse.
Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: Ayers, Althouse, Johnson, Cohen.
Statistical analysis: Ayers, Althouse.
Obtained funding: Cohen.
Administrative, technical, or material support: Althouse, Johnson.
Study supervision: Cohen.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Drs Ayers and Althouse share an equity stake in a consulting group, Directing Medicine LLC, that helps public health investigators implement some of the ideas embodied in this work. The data generation procedures, however, rely on public archives. There are no other reported conflicts of interest.
Funding/Support: This work was supported through a cooperative agreement between the Monday Campaigns and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr Ayers also acknowledges the support of the National Cancer Institute (RCA173299A).
Role of the Sponsors: The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; and preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
Additional Contributions: We thank Andy Keller, BS, and Rachel Althouse, BA, for help with translation. We thank Keith Schnakenberg, MA, and Mauricio Santilliana, PhD, MSc, for advice on data modeling.
Announcements by public figures and celebrities about cancer diagnosis or death represent significant events in public life. But what are the substantive effects of such events, if any? The purpose of this article is to systematically review studies that examined the impact of public figure cancer announcements on cancer-oriented outcomes. Using comprehensive search procedures, we identified k = 19 studies that examined 11 distinct public figures. The most commonly studied public figures were Jade Goody, Kylie Minogue, Nancy Reagan, and Steve Jobs, with the most common cancers studied being breast (53%), cervical (21%), and pancreatic (21%) cancer. Most studies assessed multiple outcome variables, including behavioral outcomes (k = 15), media coverage (k = 10), information seeking (k = 8), cancer incidence (k = 3), and interpersonal communication (k = 2). Results fairly consistently indicated that cancer announcements from public figures had meaningful effects on many, if not most, of these outcome variables. While such events essentially act as naturally occurring interventions, the effects tend to be relatively short term. Gaps in this literature include few contemporary studies of high-profile public figures in the United States and a general lack of theory-based research. Directions for future research as well as implications for cancer communication and prevention are discussed.
World No Tobacco Day (WNTD), commemorated annually on May 31, aims to inform the public about tobacco harms. Because tobacco control surveillance is usually annualized, the effectiveness of WNTD remains unexplored into its 25th year.
To explore the potential of digital surveillance (infoveillance) to evaluate the impacts of WNTD on population awareness of and interest in cessation.
Health-related news stories and Internet search queries were aggregated to form a continuous and real-time data stream. We monitored daily news coverage of and Internet search queries for cessation in seven Latin American nations from 2006 to 2011.
Cessation news coverage peaked around WNTD, typically increasing 71% (95% confidence interval [CI] 61-81), ranging from 61% in Mexico to 83% in Venezuela. Queries indicative of cessation interest peaked on WNTD, increasing 40% (95% CI 32-48), ranging from 24% in Colombia to 84% in Venezuela. A doubling in cessation news coverage was associated with approximately a 50% increase in cessation queries. To gain a practical perspective, we compared WNTD-related activity with New Year's Day and several cigarette excise tax increases in Mexico. Cessation queries around WNTD were typically greater than New Year's Day and approximated a 2.8% (95% CI -0.8 to 6.3) increase in cigarette excise taxes.
This novel evaluation suggests WNTD had a significant impact on popular awareness (media trends) and individual interest (query trends) in smoking cessation. Because WNTD is constantly evolving, our work is also a model for real-time surveillance and potential improvement in WNTD and similar initiatives.
To determine the impact of media reporting of cervical cancer in a UK celebrity on cervical screening uptake, response time and colposcopy referral and attendance.
Population-based national cervical screening programme for women in Wales, UK.
A time series regression analysis of the Welsh national cervical screening and colposcopy databases was used to examine the number of smear tests carried out between 2000 and 2010, stratified by age group and deprivation indicators. Logistic regression was used to analyse colposcopy attendance.
Over 33,000 more cervical screening tests than expected were carried out in the year of media reporting (2008/9), 11,539 (35%) of which were in the month of Jade Goody's death. The largest increase was evident in women aged 35-39 years (475 additional tests per month, 95% CI 331-619). Impacts were similar across deprivation quintiles. Colposcopy referrals increased by 18% during the year of media reporting. Increases were observed for all smear test results in 2008/9, particularly among younger women, and further rises were evident in 2009/10 for smear tests showing borderline changes and mild dyskaryosis. The proportion of women attending colposcopy appointments rose in the year of media reporting (χ(2) = 45.8, P < 0.001).
Mass media reporting of cervical cancer in a UK celebrity was associated with a significant, but transient, increase in screening uptake and colposcopy referral and attendance. Mass media reporting can play a role in enhanced detection of abnormalities, but public health messages must be communicated effectively to minimize anxiety whilst maximizing case-finding and uptake among non-responders.
The use of internet search data has been demonstrated to be effective at predicting influenza incidence. This approach may be more successful for dengue which has large variation in annual incidence and a more distinctive clinical presentation and mode of transmission.
We gathered freely-available dengue incidence data from Singapore (weekly incidence, 2004-2011) and Bangkok (monthly incidence, 2004-2011). Internet search data for the same period were downloaded from Google Insights for Search. Search terms were chosen to reflect three categories of dengue-related search: nomenclature, signs/symptoms, and treatment. We compared three models to predict incidence: a step-down linear regression, generalized boosted regression, and negative binomial regression. Logistic regression and Support Vector Machine (SVM) models were used to predict a binary outcome defined by whether dengue incidence exceeded a chosen threshold. Incidence prediction models were assessed using r² and Pearson correlation between predicted and observed dengue incidence. Logistic and SVM model performance were assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Models were validated using multiple cross-validation techniques.
The linear model selected by AIC step-down was found to be superior to other models considered. In Bangkok, the model has an r² = 0.943, and a correlation of 0.869 between fitted and observed. In Singapore, the model has an r² = 0.948, and a correlation of 0.931. In both Singapore and Bangkok, SVM models outperformed logistic regression in predicting periods of high incidence. The AUC for the SVM models using the 75th percentile cutoff is 0.906 in Singapore and 0.960 in Bangkok.
Internet search terms predict incidence and periods of large incidence of dengue with high accuracy and may prove useful in areas with underdeveloped surveillance systems. The methods presented here use freely available data and analysis tools and can be readily adapted to other settings.
Smokers can use the web to continue or quit their habit. Online vendors sell reduced or tax-free cigarettes lowering smoking costs, while health advocates use the web to promote cessation. We examined how smokers' tax avoidance and smoking cessation Internet search queries were motivated by the United States' (US) 2009 State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) federal cigarette excise tax increase and two other state specific tax increases. Google keyword searches among residents in a taxed geography (US or US state) were compared to an untaxed geography (Canada) for two years around each tax increase. Search data were normalized to a relative search volume (RSV) scale, where the highest search proportion was labeled 100 with lesser proportions scaled by how they relatively compared to the highest proportion. Changes in RSV were estimated by comparing means during and after the tax increase to means before the tax increase, across taxed and untaxed geographies. The SCHIP tax was associated with an 11.8% (95% confidence interval [95%CI], 5.7 to 17.9; p
The growth of electronic publication and informatics archives makes it possible to harvest vast quantities of knowledge about knowledge, or "metaknowledge." We review the expanding scope of metaknowledge research, which uncovers regularities in scientific claims and infers the beliefs, preferences, research tools, and strategies behind those regularities. Metaknowledge research also investigates the effect of knowledge context on content. Teams and collaboration networks, institutional prestige, and new technologies all shape the substance and direction of research. We argue that as metaknowledge grows in breadth and quality, it will enable researchers to reshape science-to identify areas in need of reexamination, reweight former certainties, and point out new paths that cut across revealed assumptions, heuristics, and disciplinary boundaries.
Celebrity diagnoses can have important effects on public behaviour. UK television celebrity Jade Goody died from cervical cancer in 2009. We investigated the impact of her illness on media coverage of cervical cancer prevention, health information seeking behaviour and cervical screening coverage.
National UK newspaper articles containing the words 'Jade Goody' and 'cancer' were examined for public health messages. Google Insights for Search was used to quantify Internet searches as a measure of public health information seeking. Cervical screening coverage data were examined for temporal associations with this story.
Of 1203 articles, 116 (9.6%) included a clear public health message. The majority highlighted screening (8.2%). Fewer articles provided advice about vaccination (3.0%), number of sexual partners (1.4%), smoking (0.6%) and condom use (0.4%). Key events were associated with increased Internet searches for 'cervical cancer' and 'smear test', although only weakly with searches for 'HPV'. Cervical screening coverage increased during this period.
Increased public interest in disease prevention can follow a celebrity diagnosis. Although media coverage sometimes included public health information, articles typically focused on secondary instead of primary prevention. There is further potential to maximize the public health benefit of future celebrity diagnoses.
Framing battles in public health illustrate the tension in our society between individual freedom and collective responsibility. This article describes how two frames, market justice and social justice, first articulated in a public health context by Dan Beauchamp, influence public dialogue on the health consequences of corporate practices. The authors argue that public health advocates must articulate the social justice values motivating the changes they seek in specific policy battles that will be debated in the context of news coverage. The authors conclude with lessons for health education practitioners who need to frame public health issues in contentious and controversial policy contexts. Specific lessons include the importance of understanding the existing values and beliefs motivating the public health change being sought, the benefits of articulating core messages that correspond to shared values, and the necessity of developing media skills to compete effectively with adversaries in public debate.
Economic stressors have been retrospectively associated with net population increases in psychological distress (PD). However, no sentinels exist to evaluate contemporaneous associations. Aggregate Internet search query surveillance was used to monitor population changes in PD around the United States' Great Recession. Monthly PD query trends were compared with unemployment, underemployment, homes in delinquency and foreclosure, median home value or sale prices, and S&P 500 trends for 2004-2010. Economic indicators were used to predict PD one to seven months into the future. PD queries surpassed 1,000,000 per month, of which 300,000 may be attributable to the Great Recession. A one-percentage point increase in mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures was associated with a 16% (95%CI,9-24) increase in PD queries one-month, and 11% (95%CI,3-18) four months later, in reference to a pre-Great Recession mean. Unemployment and underemployment had similar associations half and one-quarter the intensity. "Anxiety disorder, "what is depression, "signs of depression," "depression symptoms, and "symptoms of depression" were the queries exhibiting the strongest associations with mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures, unemployment or underemployment. Housing prices and S&P 500 trends were not associated with PD queries. Because the economy is constantly changing, this work not only provides a snapshot of recent associations between the economy and PD but also a framework and toolkit for real-time surveillance going forward. Health resources may be swiftly allocated and clinicians may alter screening practices conditional on changes in PD query trends. Public policy leaders may use PD query trends to estimate the health impacts associated with economic stimuli.
The Internet is revolutionizing tobacco control, but few have harnessed the Web for surveillance. We demonstrate for the first time an approach for analyzing aggregate Internet search queries that captures precise changes in population considerations about tobacco.
We compared tobacco-related Google queries originating in the United States during the week of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) 2009 cigarette excise tax increase with a historic baseline. Specific queries were then ranked according to their relative increases while also considering approximations of changes in absolute search volume.
Individual queries with the largest relative increases the week of the SCHIP tax were "cigarettes Indian reservations" 640% (95% CI, 472-918), "free cigarettes online" 557% (95% CI, 432-756), and "Indian reservations cigarettes" 542% (95% CI, 414-733), amounting to about 7,500 excess searches. By themes, the largest relative increases were tribal cigarettes 246% (95% CI, 228-265), "free" cigarettes 215% (95% CI, 191-242), and cigarette stores 176% (95% CI, 160-193), accounting for 21,000, 27,000, and 90,000 excess queries. All avoidance queries, including those aforementioned themes, relatively increased 150% (95% CI, 144-155) or 550,000 from their baseline. All cessation queries increased 46% (95% CI, 44-48), or 175,000, around SCHIP; including themes for "cold turkey" 19% (95% CI, 11-27) or 2,600, cessation products 47% (95% CI, 44-50) or 78,000, and dubious cessation approaches (e.g., hypnosis) 40% (95% CI, 33-47) or 2,300.
The SCHIP tax motivated specific changes in population considerations. Our strategy can support evaluations that temporally link tobacco control measures with instantaneous population reactions, as well as serve as a springboard for traditional studies, for example, including survey questionnaire design.
Social Scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research and express the appropriate degree of certainty about these quantities. In this article, we offer an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation, to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some expertise, which we try to provide herein, but its application should make the results of quantitative articles more informative and transparent. To illustrate our recommendations, we replicate the results of several published works, showing in each case how the authors' own conclusions can be expressed more sharply and informatively, and, without changing any data or statistical assumptions, how our approach reveals important new information about the research questions at hand. We also offer very easy-to-use Clarify software that implements our suggestions.
Background:
Population mental health surveillance is an important challenge limited by resource constraints, long time lags in data collection, and stigma. One promising approach to bridge similar gaps elsewhere has been the use of passively generated digital data.
Purpose:
This article assesses the viability of aggregate Internet search queries for real-time monitoring of several mental health problems, specifically in regard to seasonal patterns of seeking out mental health information.
Methods:
All Google mental health queries were monitored in the U.S. and Australia from 2006 to 2010. Additionally, queries were subdivided among those including the terms ADHD (attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder); anxiety; bipolar; depression; anorexia or bulimia (eating disorders); OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder); schizophrenia; and suicide. A wavelet phase analysis was used to isolate seasonal components in the trends, and based on this model, the mean search volume in winter was compared with that in summer, as performed in 2012.
Results:
All mental health queries followed seasonal patterns with winter peaks and summer troughs amounting to a 14% (95% CI=11%, 16%) difference in volume for the U.S. and 11% (95% CI=7%, 15%) for Australia. These patterns also were evident for all specific subcategories of illness or problem. For instance, seasonal differences ranged from 7% (95% CI=5%, 10%) for anxiety (followed by OCD, bipolar, depression, suicide, ADHD, schizophrenia) to 37% (95% CI=31%, 44%) for eating disorder queries in the U.S. Several nonclinical motivators for query seasonality (such as media trends or academic interest) were explored and rejected.
Conclusions:
Information seeking on Google across all major mental illnesses and/or problems followed seasonal patterns similar to those found for seasonal affective disorder. These are the first data published on patterns of seasonality in information seeking encompassing all the major mental illnesses, notable also because they likely would have gone undetected using traditional surveillance.
Background:
Economic stressors have been retrospectively associated with net population increases in nonspecific psychological distress (PD). However, no sentinels exist to evaluate contemporaneous associations. Aggregate Internet search query surveillance was used to monitor population changes in PD around the United States' Great Recession.
Methods:
Monthly PD query trends were compared with unemployment, underemployment, homes in delinquency and foreclosure, median home value or sale prices, and S&P 500 trends for 2004-2010. Time series analyses, where economic indicators predicted PD one to seven months into the future, were performed in 2011.
Result:
PD queries surpassed 1,000,000 per month, of which 300,000 may be attributable to the Great Recession. A one percentage point increase in mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures was associated with a 16% (95%CI, 9-24) increase in PD queries one-month, and 11% (95%CI, 3-18) four months later, in reference to a pre-Great Recession mean. Unemployment and underemployment had similar associations half and one-quarter the intensity. "Anxiety disorder", "what is depression", "signs of depression", "depression symptoms", and "symptoms of depression" were the queries exhibiting the strongest associations with mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures, unemployment or underemployment. Housing prices and S&P 500 trends were not associated with PD queries.
Limitations:
A non-traditional measure of PD was used. It is unclear if actual clinically significant depression or anxiety increased during the Great Recession. Alternative explanations for strong associations between the Great Recession and PD queries, such as media, were explored and rejected.
Conclusions:
Because the economy is constantly changing, this work not only provides a snapshot of recent associations between the economy and PD queries but also a framework and toolkit for real-time surveillance going forward. Health resources, clinician screening patterns, and policy debate may be informed by changes in PD query trends.
Opinion research is beset by two major types of "artifactual" variance: huge amounts of overtime response instability and the common tendency for seemingly trivial changes in questionnaire form to affect the expression of attitudes. We propose a simple model that converts this anomalous "error variance" into sources of substantive insight into the nature of public opinion. The model abandons the conventional but implausible notion that most people possess opinions at the level of specificity of typical survey items--and instead assumes that most people are internally conflicted over most political issues--and that most respond to survey questions on the basis of whatever ideas are at the top of their heads at the moment of answering. Numerous empirical regularities are shown to be consistent with these assumptions.
Public interest in electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) is undocumented.
By monitoring search queries, ENDS popularity and correlates of their popularity were assessed in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom (UK), and the U.S.
English-language Google searches conducted from January 2008 through September 2010 were compared to snus, nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), and Chantix® or Champix®. Searches for each week were scaled to the highest weekly search proportion (100), with lower values indicating the relative search proportion compared to the highest-proportion week (e.g., 50=50% of the highest observed proportion). Analyses were performed in 2010.
From July 2008 through February 2010, ENDS searches increased in all nations studied except Australia, there an increase occurred more recently. By September 2010, ENDS searches were several-hundred-fold greater than searches for smoking alternatives in the UK and U.S., and were rivaling alternatives in Australia and Canada. Across nations, ENDS searches were highest in the U.S., followed by similar search intensity in Canada and the UK, with Australia having the fewest ENDS searches. Stronger tobacco control, created by clean indoor air laws, cigarette taxes, and anti-smoking populations, were associated with consistently higher levels of ENDS searches.
The online popularity of ENDS has surpassed that of snus and NRTs, which have been on the market for far longer, and is quickly outpacing Chantix or Champix. In part, the association between ENDS's popularity and stronger tobacco control suggests ENDS are used to bypass, or quit in response to, smoking restrictions. Search query surveillance is a valuable, real-time, free, and public method to evaluate the diffusion of new health products. This method may be generalized to other behavioral, biological, informational, or psychological outcomes manifested on search engines.
Recent work has demonstrated that Web search volume can "predict the present," meaning that it can be used to accurately track outcomes such as unemployment levels, auto and home sales, and disease prevalence in near real time. Here we show that what consumers are searching for online can also predict their collective future behavior days or even weeks in advance. Specifically we use search query volume to forecast the opening weekend box-office revenue for feature films, first-month sales of video games, and the rank of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, finding in all cases that search counts are highly predictive of future outcomes. We also find that search counts generally boost the performance of baseline models fit on other publicly available data, where the boost varies from modest to dramatic, depending on the application in question. Finally, we reexamine previous work on tracking flu trends and show that, perhaps surprisingly, the utility of search data relative to a simple autoregressive model is modest. We conclude that in the absence of other data sources, or where small improvements in predictive performance are material, search queries provide a useful guide to the near future.
Little previous research has been done on the public health impact of mass media coverage of cancer episodes of public figures. This paper uses a variety of data sources to examine the impact of President Reagan's colon cancer episode of July, 1985. Records of phone calls to the Cancer Information Service of the National Cancer Institute are examined as a measure of public interest and concern about colorectal cancer; data on the use of two colorectal early detection tests--proctoscopy and fecal occult blood tests--are looked at as a measure of behavioral change; and data on the incidence of early and advanced colorectal cancer are used to estimate the potential public health impact of this behavioral change. We find that there was a sharp, albeit somewhat transitory, increase in public interest in colorectal cancer in the wake of President Reagan's colon cancer episode, with a corresponding increase in the use of early detection tests. The incidence data on early and advanced disease is indicative of a beneficial public health impact, but this can be confirmed only after additional data on mortality becomes available.
Smoking is a risk factor for several diseases and has been increasing in many developing countries. Our aim was to estimate global and regional mortality in 2000 caused by smoking, including an analysis of uncertainty.
Following the methods of Peto and colleagues, we used lung-cancer mortality as an indirect marker for accumulated smoking risk. Never-smoker lung-cancer mortality was estimated based on the household use of coal with poor ventilation. Relative risks were taken from the American Cancer Society Cancer Prevention Study, phase II, and the retrospective proportional mortality analysis of Liu and colleagues in China. Relative risks were corrected for confounding and extrapolation to other regions.
We estimated that in 2000, 4.83 (uncertainty range 3.94-5.93) million premature deaths in the world were attributable to smoking; 2.41 (1.80-3.15) million in developing countries and 2.43 (2.13-2.78) million in industrialised countries. 3.84 million of these deaths were in men. The leading causes of death from smoking were cardiovascular diseases (1.69 million deaths), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (0.97 million deaths), and lung cancer (0.85 million deaths).
Smoking was an important cause of global mortality in 2000. In view of the expected demographic and epidemiological transitions and current smoking patterns in the developing world, the health loss due to smoking will grow even larger unless effective interventions and policies that reduce smoking among men and prevent increases among women in developing countries are implemented.
Although smoking is widely recognized as a major cause of cancer, there is little information on how it contributes to the global and regional burden of cancers in combination with other risk factors that affect background cancer mortality patterns. We used data from the American Cancer Society's Cancer Prevention Study II (CPS-II) and the WHO and IARC cancer mortality databases to estimate deaths from 8 clusters of site-specific cancers caused by smoking, for 14 epidemiologic subregions of the world, by age and sex. We used lung cancer mortality as an indirect marker for accumulated smoking hazard. CPS-II hazards were adjusted for important covariates. In the year 2000, an estimated 1.42 (95% CI 1.27-1.57) million cancer deaths in the world, 21% of total global cancer deaths, were caused by smoking. Of these, 1.18 million deaths were among men and 0.24 million among women; 625,000 (95% CI 485,000-749,000) smoking-caused cancer deaths occurred in the developing world and 794,000 (95% CI 749,000-840,000) in industrialized regions. Lung cancer accounted for 60% of smoking-attributable cancer mortality, followed by cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract (20%). Based on available data, more than one in every 5 cancer deaths in the world in the year 2000 were caused by smoking, making it possibly the single largest preventable cause of cancer mortality. There was significant variability across regions in the role of smoking as a cause of the different site-specific cancers. This variability illustrates the importance of coupling research and surveillance of smoking with that for other risk factors for more effective cancer prevention.
To describe the main media narratives in the reportage of singer Kylie Minogue's illness with breast cancer; and to assess the impact of this coverage on bookings for screening for breast cancer by mammography in four Australian states.
Government sponsored BreastScreen programs in Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.
Narratives on breast cancer in television news programs 17-27 May 2005; initial and re-screening bookings for mammograms.
Women aged > or = 40 years who booked for mammograms in BreastScreen programs in the 19 weeks before, the 2 weeks during, and the 6 weeks after the publicity.
There was a 20-fold increase in news coverage of breast cancer, which emphasised that young women do get breast cancer and that early detection was critical. Overall screening bookings rose 40% in the 2 weeks of the publicity, with a 101% increase in non-screened women in the eligible age-group 40-69 years. Six weeks after the publicity, bookings remained more than a third higher in non-screened women.
News coverage of Kylie Minogue's breast cancer diagnosis caused an unprecedented increase in bookings for mammography. Health advocates should develop anticipatory strategies for responding to news coverage of celebrity illness.
Brazil's former president Lula's cancer diagnosis
- Economist