General and specific cancer risk perceptions: how are they related?

Understanding how people construe and act upon cancer risk is important for efforts to target risk-increasing health behaviors. Importantly, research participants are often asked to estimate their risk for cancer (in general), which could mask the fact that cancer represents a range of diseases, and that different cancer types can have distinct risk factors. It is unclear whether individuals perceive general cancer risk as being comprised of an aggregation of risk for specific cancer sites, or whether general cancer risk perceptions reflect the specific type of cancer most salient to them. In this study, general cancer risk perceptions were regressed on specific risk perceptions for colon, lung, prostate (men only), and breast (women only), using data from a nationally representative sample. We found that among men and women, all forms of cancer predicted independent variance in estimates of general cancer risk. There were also stronger relationships between general risk perceptions and each specific risk perception than between any two specific risk perceptions, suggesting that individuals differentiate between specific cancers and general cancer risk. These findings offer some confidence that people’s estimates of general cancer risk take multiple cancer types into account.