Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 8, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: May 11, 2018 - Jul 6, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 6, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Correlation analysis among incidence and mortality of cancers and online public attention in China
ABSTRACT
Background:
Cancers pose a serious threat to health of Chinese people, resulting in a immense challenge to public health work. Nowadays, people could get related information not only from medical workers in hospitals, but also retrieve on Internet everywhere in real-time. Online search behaviors can reflect population’s awareness on cancers from a completely new perspective, which could be driven by underlying cancer epidemiology.
Objective:
The objective of our study was mainly to explore whether there was a correlation among incidence and mortaliy of cancers and online search behaviors. A secondary objective was to predict future incidence and mortality of theses cancers if the correlation was existed.
Methods:
We used standard Boolean operators to choose search terms of each cancer. We used Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient to validate the correlation among monthly search index values of each cancer type and their monthly incidence and mortality rates. ARIMA model and linear regression model were simultaneously used to predict incidence and mortality of these cancers in future.
Results:
Monthly search index values statistically significantly correlated with cancer incidence rates in 26 of 28 cancers in China, ( lung cancer: r=.80, P<.001; liver cancer: r=.28, P=.016; stomach cancer: r=.50, P<.001; esophageal cancer: r=.50, P<.001; colorectal cancer: r=.81, P<.001; pancreatic cancer: r=.86, P<.001; breast cancer: r=.56, P<.001; brain and nervous system cancer: r=.63, P<.001; leukemia: r=.75, P<.001; Non-Hodgkin lymphoma: r=.88, P<.001; Hodgkin lymphoma: r=.91, P<.001; cervical cancer: r=.64, P<.001; prostate cancer: r=.67, P<.001; bladder cancer: r=.62, P<.001; gallbladder and biliary tract cancer: r=.88, P<.001; lip and oral cavity cancer: r=.88, P<.001; ovarian cancer: r=.58, P<.001; larynx cancer: r=.82, P<.001; kidney cancer: r=.73, P<.001; squamous-cell carcinoma: r=.94, P<.001; multiple myeloma: r=.84, P<.001; thyroid cancer: r=.77, P<.001; malignant skin melanoma: r=.55, P<.001; mesothelioma: r=.79, P<.001; testicular cancer: r=.57, P<.001; basal-cell carcinoma: r=.83, P<.001). Meanwhile, monthly Baidu search index values statistically significantly correlated with cancer mortality rates in 24 of 27 cancers but not for stomach cancer, esophageal cancer and testicular cancer.
Conclusions:
Online search behaviors indeed reflect public awareness from a different angle. Research on Internet search behaviors may be an innovative and advance-time tool to monitor and estimate cancer incidence and mortality rates, especially for cancers not included in national registries.
Citation
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