Public Interest and Behavior Change in the United States Regarding Colorectal Cancer Following the Death of Chadwick Boseman: Infodemiology Investigation of Internet Search Trends Nationally and in At-Risk Areas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Colorectal cancer (CRC) has the third highest cancer mortality rate in the United States. Enhanced screening has reduced mortality rates; however, certain populations remain at high risk, notably African Americans. Raising awareness among at-risk populations may lead to improved CRC outcomes. The influence of celebrity death and illness is an important driver of public awareness. As such, the death of actor Chadwick Boseman from CRC may have influenced CRC awareness. Objective We sought to assess the influence of Chadwick Boseman’s death on public interest in CRC in the United States, evidenced by internet searches, website traffic, and donations to prominent cancer organizations. Methods We used an auto-regressive integrated moving average model to forecast Google searching trends for the topic “Colorectal cancer” in the United States. We performed bivariate and multivariable regressions on state-wise CRC incidence rate and percent Black population. We obtained data from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the Colon Cancer Foundation (CCF) for information regarding changes in website traffic and donations. Results The expected national relative search volume (RSV) for colorectal cancer was 2.71 (95% CI 1.76-3.66), reflecting a 3590% (95% CI 2632%-5582%) increase compared to the expected values. With multivariable regression, the statewise RSV increased for each percent Black population by 1.09 (SE 0.18, P<.001), with 42% of the variance explained (P<.001). The American Cancer Society reported a 58,000% increase in CRC-related website traffic the weekend following Chadwick Boseman’s death compared to the weekend before. The Colon Cancer Foundation reported a 331% increase in donations and a 144% increase in revenue in the month following Boseman’s death compared to the month prior. Conclusions Our results suggest that Chadwick Boseman’s death was associated with substantial increases in awareness of CRC. Increased awareness of CRC may support earlier detection and better prognoses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".