Interest in mammography across European countries: a retrospective “Google Trends” comparative study

BACKGROUND: Breast cancer is currently the most prevalent and impacting cancer among women and mammography has been recommended for screening by The European Commission Initiative on Breast Cancer since 2003. The objective of this study is to estimate the interest in breast cancer screening breast cancer in European countries by analyzing data from online searches for the term “mammography” obtained via Google Trends. METHODS: The relative search volumes (RSVs) of the term “mammography” translated into various languages and relating to the January 2010–December 2022 period were downloaded from Google Trends. The between-countries differences growth of interest was estimated by a regression model in which the country-time interaction term was introduced. RESULTS: France [coefficient (coeff): 0.23; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.18–0.28], United Kingdom (coeff: 0.22; 95% CI: 0.18–0.27) and Germany (coeff: 0.21; 95% CI: 0.16–0.25) showed the higher growth in mammography interest when compared to the average growth. The lowest growths were observed in Eastern European countries: Croatia (coeff: −0.13; 95% CI: −0.18 to −0.09), Serbia (coeff: −0.14; 95% CI: −0.18 to −0.09), Greece (coeff: −0.14; 95% CI: −0.18 to −0.09), Slovenia (coeff: −0.15; 95% CI: −0.2 to −0.11) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (coeff: −0.15; 95% CI: −0.2 to −0.11). CONCLUSIONS: These exploratory findings suggest that online interest in mammography is lower in countries with lower screening coverage and higher breast cancer mortality. These countries could adopt strategies to raise awareness of breast cancer prevention.