Cancer fear can impact screening uptake

People who worry about cancer are more likely to want to get screened for colon cancer, but feeling uncomfortable at the thought of cancer makes them less likely to actually go for the test, finds new UCL-led research. The study, published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention , looked at how different types of fear influenced colorectal cancer screening decisions in nearly eight thousand UK adults. Different experiences of fear were found to have different effects on people's likeliness to get tested. "Many people are afraid of getting cancer, but fear doesn't have the same effect on everyone," explains lead author Charlotte Vrinten, a research psychologist at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Research Centre at UCL. "For some people, cancer fear motivates them to get checked up, for others, it puts them off from finding out whether they have cancer. "No-one before has worked out why fear might have such opposite effects. In our study, instead of using a combined measure of cancer fear, as is often done, we distinguished different aspects of fear to see whether they had different effects on people's decisions about cancer screening." People who worried a lot about cancer were more likely to want to get screened for colon cancer, but those who felt uncomfortable thinking about cancer were 12% less likely to attend screening.