Impact of Breast Cancer Awareness Month on Public Interest in the United States between 2012 and 2021: A Google Trends Analysis

Abstract

Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM) has a long history of over 30 years, established in 1985 to occur every October, and the National Breast Cancer Foundation now leads the operation. There have been no studies to evaluate the impact of the BCAM on public awareness of breast cancer. We analyzed the impact of BCAM on public awareness of breast cancer in the U.S. from 2012 to 2021 using the relative search volume (RSV) of Google Trends as a surrogate. We also analyzed the impact of Lung Cancer Awareness Month (LCAM) and Prostate Cancer Awareness Month (PCAM) on public awareness of lung and prostate cancer, respectively, to see differences in their effectiveness among the health observances for the top three most common cancers in the U.S. We performed a joinpoint regression analysis to identify statistically significant time points of a change in trend. There were joinpoints around BCAM for “Breast cancer” every year from 2012 to 2021, with a significant increase in the weekly RSVs from 21.9% to 46.7%. Except for 2013 and 2015 for “Lung cancer”, when significant increases in the RSV at 1.8% and 1.2% per week were observed around LCAM, no joinpoints were noted around LCAM or PCAM. These results imply that BCAM has successfully improved the public awareness of breast cancer in the U.S. compared to other representative health observances, likely due to the effective involvement of non-medical industries, influencers affected by breast cancer, and an awareness symbol.