Web-Based Medical Information Searching by Chinese Patients With Breast Cancer and its Influence on Survival: Observational Study

BackgroundThe internet allows patients to easily look for health information. However, how Chinese patients with breast cancer use the internet has rarely been investigated, and there is a scarcity of information about the influence of internet use on survival. ObjectiveThis observational study aimed to investigate the details of online medical information searching by Chinese patients with breast cancer and to determine whether internet use has any survival benefits. MethodsPatients who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer at Peking Union Medical College Hospital between January 2014 and December 2015 were enrolled. We obtained information on their internet-searching behavior and gathered data from the patients’ medical and follow-up records. The associations between internet use and other clinic-pathological factors were analyzed. A Cox proportional-hazards model and the Kaplan-Meier method were used for disease-free survival (DFS) analyses. ResultsA total of 973 patients with invasive breast cancer who underwent definitive surgery took part in the study. Among them, 477 cases (49.0%) performed web-based breast cancer information searching before the initial treatment. A multivariate logistic regression analysis suggested that web-based breast cancer information searching was significantly associated with younger age (odds ratio [OR] 0.95, 95% CI 0.94-0.97, P