Cancer Awareness

 

A major strand of our research is in the role of social media in promoting cancer awareness, screening and help-seeking for symptoms. Following extensive reviewing to document the state of the art (see our Scoping Review and associated protocol), we are now designing interventions which will be then be evaluated in practice. Since our review flagged up gaps in reporting practice, we are also developing guidelines for reporting studies of social media interventions in health behaviour.

We have found that as expected groups of low socioeconomic status have the highest number of years of life lost to cancer. For poor prognosis cancers, the socioeconomic disparities are highest for young adults whereas for better prognosis cancers, the disparities are highest for older people (paper to be published in British Journal of Cancer).

Another major project is the analysis of hospital admission codes, firstly as a proxy for cancer awareness, and secondly to identify relevant signs and symptoms of cancer significantly prior to actual diagnosis. We addressed colon cancer in the first instance. We found that both the proportion of patients with at least one emergency admission and the number of admissions per patient is higher in the most deprived than the least deprived, in the time window between two years and the last month prior to diagnosis. We have identified 20 codes significantly associated with emergency hospitalisation in colon cancer patients. We are repeating the analysis in lung cancer, and results will be published in the near future.