Dr. Google sees you now! Women diagnosed with ovarian cancer look for the tell-tale symptoms of a deadly disease a YEAR before being diagnosed
‘Dr. Google’ could be used in the future to detect cases of ovarian cancer up to a year earlier, researchers suggest.
Women battling the disease sought symptoms such as weight loss, bladder problems and bloating for up to 360 days before being referred to a specialist.
Google also saw a ‘spike’ in searches for urinary symptoms – a key warning sign of cancer – up to four months before a GP referral.
Pelvic pain also apparently appeared 70 days in advance.
Researchers from Imperial College London, who tracked the Google search histories of 235 women, claimed the data offers “huge potential in health and disease screening” – even though patients have long been discouraged from Googling their symptoms.
Women battling the disease sought symptoms such as weight loss, bladder problems and bloating for up to 360 days before being referred to a specialist. Google also saw a ‘spike’ in searches for urinary symptoms – a key warning sign of cancer – up to four months before a GP referral. Pelvic pain also apparently appeared 70 days in advance
The disease kills an average of 11 women every day in Britain, or 4,000 a year. Figures show that three times as many people die from it every year in the US. When symptoms are caused by ovarian cancer, they tend to be persistent. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends that your GP arranges tests if you experience these symptoms 12 or more times a month.
The team also said it questioned the long-held belief that ovarian cancer is a ‘silent killer’, with most women thought to show few signs of the disease.
Lead author Dr Jennifer Barcroft said: ‘Our results show that it is possible to use search engine data to understand how conditions occur, and that this could be useful in the early detection of disease.
‘Online search data offers enormous potential in health and disease screening given the widespread use of the Internet worldwide.
‘We hope that our research will increase interest in this new area of research.’
Ovarian cancer is the sixth most common cancer in Britain. The disease kills around 11 women every day in Britain, or 4,000 a year.
Three times as many women in the US also die from it every year, figures show.
It is often diagnosed late because symptoms are vague and may include indigestion, pelvic or abdominal pain, loss of appetite, constipation, and increased urination.
About 93 percent of women diagnosed live for five years or more if the disease is caught in its earliest stages, compared to just 13 percent when diagnosed at stage four.
About a fifth of women with ovarian cancer are also diagnosed in the emergency room, often when it is too late for any treatment.
Fellow researcher Dr. Srdjan Saso, a gynecological cancer surgeon, called the disease “one of the most deadly forms of cancer for women.”
He added: ‘The focus therefore remains on facilitating early disease detection.’
The data of the Britons involved in the study was obtained with consent through Google Takeout – a tool that allows people to download a copy of their data stored in Google products.
Using the tool’s health search filters, researchers tracked the differences in Google searches between women who did and did not have ovarian cancer.
Writing in the diary BMC medicinethey said there were differences between people with and without positive diagnoses ‘noted by the GP 360 days before referral’.
About 60 days before a referral, predictions became more accurate.
However, Professor Ingemar Cox, a computer scientist at University College London and senior author of the study, warned that the findings also raise “important ethical and privacy issues that need to be addressed.”
It comes as a damning report last month found Britain’s survival rates for five common cancers lag drastically behind those of other high-income countries.
Only 37.1 percent of Britons diagnosed with ovarian cancer between 2010 and 2014 expected to still be alive five years later.
In contrast, the percentage was 46.2 percent, 43.2 percent and 40.3 percent in Norway, Australia and Canada.
While the level of progress in cancer survival has been rapid in some forms of the disease, such as breast and prostate cancer, others, such as lung and pancreas, have improved only at a snail’s pace.
Even patients who did receive treatment had to wait longer, increasing the risk of their disease spreading and reducing their chances of survival.
Health leaders have consistently warned that a range of key cancer targets have gone unhit in recent years.
They also estimate that 40,000 cases of cancer went undiagnosed in the first year of the pandemic alone.
Official NHS data for December on cancer waiting times shows that only seven in ten (74.2 percent) of patients urgently referred for suspected cancer were diagnosed or ruled out with cancer within 28 days. The goal is 75 percent.
Only nine in ten (91.1 percent) wait a month or less to start their first cancer treatment after deciding whether to proceed with surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
The target is 96 percent, but this has never been achieved.
Why ovarian cancer is called a ‘silent killer’
About 80 percent of ovarian cancer cases are diagnosed in the advanced stages of the disease.
By the time they are diagnosed, 60 percent of ovarian cancer cases will have already spread to other parts of the body, reducing the five-year survival rate to 30 percent, compared to 90 percent in the earliest stages.
It is diagnosed so late because of its location in the pelvis, said Dr. Ronny Drapkin, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied the disease for more than two decades.
‘The pelvis is like a bowl, so a tumor there can become quite large before it actually becomes noticeable,’ Drapkin told MailOnline.
The first symptoms that occur with ovarian cancer are gastrointestinal because tumors can push upwards.
When a patient complains of gastrointestinal discomfort, doctors are more likely to focus on dietary changes and other causes than suggest screening for ovarian cancer.
Drapkin said it is usually only after a patient has endured persistent gastrointestinal symptoms that he or she will undergo a screening that reveals the cancer.
“It is often said that ovarian cancer is a silent killer because it has no early symptoms, when in fact it does have symptoms, which are very common and can be caused by other things,” he said.
‘One of the things I tell women is that no one knows your body as well as you do. If you feel something is wrong, something is probably wrong.”