What kind of information do parents seek out when a child has cancer? If researchers can analyze their online searchers, it may be possible to obtain health-related information that offers one window into their concerns and provides insight into how healthcare providers may provide family education and support.
An investigation carried out by oncology researchers about online Google searchers of parents discovered that, among other things, parents frequently focus on ways to best support their child and logistical issues including directions to medical centers and appropriate pharmacies.
The study leader, Charles A. Phillips, M.D., a pediatric oncologist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), said that there had been a lot of research into what people say they want to find online, but little is known about the specific, granular details that parents of cancer patients seek out. To oncologists' knowledge, this is the first study of online Google searchers by parents of children with cancer. Phillips and the team published the study in Pediatric Blood and Cancer.
Enrolled in the study were 21 parents with 17 among them were mothers of children diagnosed with cancer at CHOP in the summer of 2017. The parents consented to share their Google search histories from the time of the study enrolment during their child's cancer treatment to a retrospective time point, six months before the child was diagnosed. After admission, other members of the research team who did not know the identities of patients or families coded searches into categories and further analyzed the findings.
Expectantly, parents performed health-related searchers at over twice the rate performed by the general population - 13 percent versus 5 percent of total Google searches. Parents' Google uses peaks at about one month after a cancer diagnosis. Eighteen percent of health-related searchers, about 1,900 out of 11,000, were cancer-specific and over half of the cancer-specific searches were for cancer support such as queries for cancer charities and inspirational quotations.
Ultimately, Phillips noted that the findings of the study could inform family support and education. The hospital might come up with a design of educational interventions to help parents navigate better the internet for cancer information, and researchers could evaluate such interventions in a randomized trial.
Phillips cautioned against overgeneralizing from the current small, single-center study. The next steps for researchers in this field would require organizing a more extensive study, possibly covering a broader variety of cancers or a larger range of online information sources. He suggested a future paired study to investigate how adolescent patients search for health information compared to how their parents search.
