Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 8, 2019
Date Accepted: Feb 22, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Detecting Lung Cancer Trends Leveraging Real world and Internet Based Data: Digital Epidemiology Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Internet search data can reflect people’s concerns about health-related topics in near-real time and serve as an supplementary metric of disease characteristics. In this study, we presented a detailed analysis of the associations between Google relative search volumes (RSV) and lung cancer, and further forecast future trends of lung cancer in the US.
Objective:
To explore the association of internet search volumes for lung cancer with published cancer incidence and mortality rates in the United States.
Methods:
We created a smoothed time series of RSV to eliminate the effects of irregular changes and obtain the long-term trend at both the national and state levels. We performed cross-sectional analyses of original and decomposed Google RSV data and disease metrics at the national and state levels.
Results:
The trends of lung cancer-related internet hits were consistent with the trends of the reported lung cancer incidence nationally. Ohio had the highest RSV. At the state level, the RSV is statistically significantly correlated with lung cancer incidence in 42 regions, with correlation ranging from 0.578 to 0.943. RSV is also statistically significantly correlated with mortality in 47 regions. Both the lung cancer incidence and mortality were correlated with decomposed RSV in 50 regions, except Vermont.
Conclusions:
Search behaviors indeed reflect public awareness of cancer. Google Trends data offers tremendous scientific possibilities to complement traditional lung cancer screening, data collection and analysis of related interests. Research on internet search behaviors could offer an innovative and timely approach to monitoring and estimating lung cancer incidence and mortality rates.
Citation
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