ArticleCancer causes & control : CCC2024
What do cancer survivors believe caused their cancer? A secondary analysis of cross-sectional survey data.
Article in Cancer causes & control : CCC, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Women's perceptions of breast cancer risk and prevention: insights into knowledge gaps and lifestyle attitudes.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Associations of fine particulate matter pollution components with overall, prostate cancer, and cardiovascular disease mortality in men with prostate cancer: A cohort study.Environmental research · 2026Article
- Causal Attributions in Patients With Breast and Gynecological Cancers: A Scoping Review.Psycho-oncology · 2025Article
- Narratives of resilience: Understanding Iranian breast cancer survivors through health belief model and stress-coping theory for enhanced interventions.BMC women's health · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeGiven that risk reduction and healthy lifestyles can prevent 4 in 10 cancers, it is important to understand what survivors believe caused their cancer to inform educational initiatives.
methodsIn this secondary analysis, we analyzed cancer survivor responses on the Causes Subscale of the Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire, which lists 18 possible causes of illness and a free text question. We used descriptive statistics to determine cancer survivors' agreement with the listed causes and conducted separate partial proportional odds models for the top three causes to examine their associations with sociodemographic and clinical characteristics. Content analysis was used to examine free text responses.
resultsOf the 1,001 participants, most identified as Caucasian (n = 764, 77%), female (n = 845, 85%), and were diagnosed with breast cancer (n = 656, 66%). The most commonly believed causes of cancer were: stress or worry (n = 498, 51%), pollution in the environment (n = 471, 48%), and chance or bad luck (n = 412, 42%). The associations of sociodemographic and clinical variables varied across the models. Free text responses indicated that hereditary and genetic causes (n = 223, 22.3%) followed by trauma and stress (n = 218, 21.8%) and bad luck or chance (n = 79, 7.9%) were the most important causes of cancer.
conclusionsStudy results illuminate cancer survivors' beliefs about varying causes of their cancer diagnosis and identify characteristics of survivors who are more likely to believe certain factors caused their cancer. Results can be used to plan cancer education and risk-reduction campaigns and highlight for whom such initiatives would be most suitable.
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