Internet search trends and online awareness of skin cancer and melanoma in the Republic of Ireland and the UK
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BRIEF REPORT
Internet search trends and online awareness of skin cancer and melanoma in the Republic of Ireland and the UK Gregg Murray 1
&
Rebecca Hellen 1 & Marina O’Kane 1
Received: 19 November 2019 / Accepted: 31 August 2020 # Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland 2020
Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in both the Republic of Ireland and the UK despite ongoing efforts to address this major public health problem [1–3]. Early detection and diagnosis of skin cancer, particularly malignant melanoma, is critical for good prognostic outcomes. Data accumulated by the Irish Cancer Registry in the Republic of Ireland has shown that the majority of melanoma cases are diagnosed at an early stage, but approximately 20% of males and 13–14% of female patients with melanoma were clinical stage III or IV at time of diagnosis [1]. This highlights the need for earlier detection and intervention. The advent of social media and social technologies has changed the way we interact with the world and has changed the way the public interacts with healthcare. The aim of this study was to analyse overall internet search trends for skin cancer in Ireland and the UK and to evaluate if skin cancer online interests have risen over the recent 5 years due to traditional and social media awareness campaigns. A retrospective observational study was designed to evaluate internet search activity data using Google Trends for the terms ‘skin cancer’, ‘melanoma’, ‘basal cell carcinoma’ and ‘squamous cell skin carcinoma’ in both Ireland and the UK from 2014 to 2018 (5 years). These search terms were recorded using Google Trends, a search volume reporting tool which provides results for search terms that receive significant amount of online traffic [4, 5]. This software has been used in hundreds of peer-reviewed medical publications, most notably in * Gregg Murray [email protected] 1
Department of Dermatology, Beaumont Hospital, Beaumont, Dublin 9, Ireland
efforts to track infectious disease outbreaks [6, 7]. Google Trends was used over other search volume reporting tools such as Keyword Generator, Keyword Surfer and KeyWordIt. The reason for using Google Trends over these tools is that it is the only search tool that reports the relative search popularity of a keyword over time, therefore allowing the user to visualise trends. Data from Google Trends does not represent absolute search volume but rather assigns a reference value of 100% to the peak search activity, and all other data over different time periods is presented relative to that peak [4]. The mean search activity per month was recorded and the mean activity at annual intervals calculated. Values for mean search activity were plotted on a ‘XY scattered chart’. Differences in mean search activity per year were then compared and analysed repeatedly by oneway ANOVA aiming to determine significant differences in the mean search activity. Student’s t tests were performed for pairwise comparison using SPSS (IBM Corporation, Somers). There was a significant increase in search acti
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