Cancer Loyalty Card Study

Approximately 7,400 new cases of ovarian cancer are diagnosed each year in the United Kingdom (UK), and with over 4,000 women dying from the disease each year it is a particularly lethal form of cancer. The symptoms for ovarian cancer are not well known and vague, and most women are diagnosed at a late stage when the cancer has already spread around the abdominal cavity with poor prognosis. Novel methods are needed to improve earlier detection and thereby improve survival from this disease. The Cancer Loyalty Card Study (CLOCS) proposes to use loyalty card data from two participating high street retailers to investigate purchase behaviour as an opportunity for cancer symptom surveillance. The investigators aim to conduct a case-control study of ovarian cancer patients matched with women without ovarian cancer and to explore public preferences for how to communicate potential outcomes of the commercial and health data linkages back to individuals. Eligible participants will be women in the UK who own at least one loyalty card with the participating high street retailers. Of these women, those who have been diagnosed with ovarian cancer are eligible to participate in the study as cases, while women who have not been diagnosed with ovarian cancer are eligible to participate as controls. Upon choosing to participate, all participants will be asked to complete a short questionnaire about well-established ovarian cancer risk factors and common symptoms either in the clinic (cases) or online/from a packet in the mail(controls). This information will be used in risk assessment for ovarian cancer of participants, which will be used at the analysis stage.