Gauging public awareness and interest related to pancreatic cancer: An analysis of Google search volumes.
250 Background: Over the last 2 decades, the internet has become a major source of medical information. Infoveillance, i.e., public health surveillance using online content analysis has become a powerful tool and internet search activity has been used as a surrogate to gauge public awareness and interest for particular diseases. We aimed to evaluate the search volume for pancreatic cancer (PC), using colon cancer (CC), as a comparator, using data from a popular search engine. Methods: Using Google Trends, a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, we compared the relative frequency of search terms ‘pancreatic cancer’ and ‘colon cancer’ between 1st January 2004 and 31st August 2017 (n = 164 months). The program assigns a reference value of 100 for the point of maximum popularity from among all the search terms during the search period and provides comparative monthly scores, which we termed relative interest scores (RIS). The RIS for each cancer was then adjusted for incidence (i.e., 53,070 for PC and 95,270 for CC, based on 2016 data), calculated per 10,000 patients and termed ‘i-RIS’. A p-value of < 0.05 was considered significant. Results: For the entire duration, the maximum popularity (RIS = 100) corresponded to a point in March 2008 for PC, likely related to the diagnosis of a famous celebrity during that month. Similar but smaller surges in RIS were observed for other significant news events related to PC during other months (January 2009, October 2009 and October 2011). Overall, the mean (±S.D) RIS for PC and CC were 32.52±8.98 and 50.18±6.44, respectively (p < 0.001). However, the i-RIS was somewhat higher for PC (6.12±1.69) as compared with CC (5.26±0.67) (p < 0.001). Conclusions: Internet search data can provide estimates of public awareness and interest related to cancer. For PC, incidence-adjusted search volumes show spikes in search volumes related to major news events, providing internal validation of these results. Generating news items and promotion by celebrities may play a significant role in the success of cancer awareness campaigns.