Many people ignore warning signs for colorectal cancer
By Aaron Levin, Staff Writer
Health Behavior News Service
Such attitudes, says Jill Cockburn, PhD, of the Cancer Council NSW in Australia, reflect an “ostrich approach to health and illness management.”
Recognizing the early warning signs of colorectal cancers is important because the chances of successful treatment are greater if they are detected early.
The telephone survey of 1,332 people in New South Wales, Australia, by Cockburn and colleagues, published in the July-August issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior, found that about two out of three respondents could name at least one symptom of cancer of the colon or rectum. But about a quarter of those surveyed could not name even one symptom of colorectal cancer.
Women, people with more education, and those who believed in the benefits of early detection were more likely to know about symptoms.
The interviewees were then asked if they had experienced blood in a bowel movement, the primary symptom of colorectal cancer. About 306 respondents said they had experienced this, 182 (14 percent) within the previous five years.
Of this latter group, 46 percent saw a doctor within a week about their concern and another 14 percent waited as long as a month. Nine percent waited three months or longer and 32 percent did not seek medical advice at all. The people who did not see a doctor most often explained their actions by saying that they thought it wasn’t serious or that it would clear up by itself.
Cockburn says she worries that general information presented in the media is not enough to move people to take action even once they are aware of their own risk.
“More focused campaigns are warranted to recommend a specific behavior when symptoms are first noticed,” she says. This might include more detailed information and advice distributed through the mass media and more emphasis on doctors offering information tailored to their patients, she notes.
“Any educational campaign should be based on principles of behavior change that target the underlying perceptions found in this study, namely that bleeding from the rectum is not cause for concern,” she says.
Cockburn’s work was produced as part of the work of the
Cancer Council NSW, Centre for Health Research and Psycho-Oncology.
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Interviews: Contact Caroline O’Brien at +011-61-2-9334 1878 or carolineo@nswcc.org.au.
American Journal of Health Behavior: Visit www.ajhb.org
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