Internet-based eHealth technology for emotional well-being among the older adults with a family cancer history: full mediation effects of health information self-efficacy and cancer fatalism.

BACKGROUND: Older adults with a family cancer history (FCH) face an increased cancer risk, which may adversely impact their emotional well-being. Internet-based eHealth technologies (IETs) provide a potential solution to this challenge. This study examines the influence of using IETs on the emotional well-being of older adults with FCH. It also delves into the mediating pathways through health information self-efficacy and cancer fatalism. METHODS: This study conducted a mediation analysis using data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS 6) collected from March 2022 to November 2022, focusing on older adults with FCH who had previously searched for cancer-related information (N = 1,280). RESULTS: In the mediation model, no positive direct associations between IETs usage and emotional well-being were found. Only health information self-efficacy and cancer fatalism were found to mediate the relationship between IETs usage and emotional well-being serially (ß = 0.007, 95% CI [0.003, 0.012]). CONCLUSIONS: The findings inform health information professionals and healthcare practitioners on enhancing the impact of IETs usage on individual health information self-efficacy, which mitigates cancer fatalism, contributing to better emotional well-being in the digital era.

Effects of electronic personal health information technology on American women's cancer screening behaviors mediated through cancer worry: Differences and similarities between 2017 and 2020.

Backgrounds: Thanks to their accessibility and low cost, electronic personal health information (ePHI) technologies have been widely used to facilitate patient-physician communication and promote health prevention behaviors (e.g. cancer screening). Despite that empirical evidence has supported the association between ePHI technology use and cancer screening behaviors, the underlying mechanism through which ePHI technology use influences cancer screening behaviors remains a topic of discussion. Objective: This study investigates the relationship between ePHI technology uses and cancer screening behaviors of American women and examines the mediating role of cancer worry. Methods: Data for this study were from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) collected in 2017 (HINTS 5 Cycle 1) and 2020 (HINTS 5 Cycle 4). The final sample included 1914 female respondents in HINTS 5 Cycle 1 and 2204 in HINTS 5 Cycle 4. Mann-Whitney U test, two-sample t-test, and mediation analysis were performed. We also referred to the regression coefficients generated by min-max normalization as percentage coefficients (bp) for the comparison. Results: This study reports increased usage of ePHI technologies (from 1.41 in 2017 to 2.19 to 2020), increased cancer worry (from 2.60 in 2017 to 2.84 in 2020), and a stable level of cancer screening behaviors (from 1.44 in 2017 to 1.34 in 2020) among American women. Cancer worry was found to mediate the ePHI effect on cancer screening behaviors (bp = 0.005, 95% confidence interval [0.001, 0.010]) in a positive complementary mediation in 2020. Conclusions: The research findings support a positive association between ePHI technology use and cancer screening behaviors, and cancer worry has been identified as a salient mediator. An understanding of the mechanism that prompts US women's cancer screening practices provides practical implications for health campaign practitioners.

Effect of information encounter on concerns over healthy eating- mediated through body comparison and moderated by body mass index or body satisfaction.

BACKGROUND: Understanding factors that influence healthy or unhealthy eating can inform intervention strategies. This study ascertained whether and how unintentional exposure to food and nutrition information influenced healthy eating concerns. The study tested body comparison, body satisfaction, and body mass index as three mechanisms that potentially link food information encounter, commonly known as information scanning, to healthy eating concerns. METHODS: A sample of 440 online participants (mean age = 29.15 years) was used to investigate: (1) how unintentional exposure to food and nutrition information, i.e., information encounter (IE), affects healthy eating concerns (HEC); (2) how the effect of IE on HEC is mediated by body comparison (BC); (3) how the paths of the mediation model are moderated by body satisfaction (BS) or body mass index (BMI). RESULTS: The findings show a positive and sizable total effect of IE on HEC - a whole-scale increase in information encounter is associated with a substantial increase in healthy eating concerns by 15 percentage points (bp = 0.150). BC is found to mediate the effect of IE on HEC in an all-positive complementary mediation. Both the indirect and the direct-and-remainder paths show sizable effects. The mediated path contributes about 20% of the total effect between IE and HEC (cp = 20%), while the direct-and-remainder path contributes the rest (cp = 80%). BS was found to moderate the relationship between IE and BC, the first leg of the mediation. The moderation effect is large - the effect of IE on BC is much smaller on the highly and the moderately satisfied than on the lowly satisfied (slope differential bp = -.60). BMI was found to moderate the direct-and-remainder effect of IE on HEC, controlling BC. That is, the effect of IE on HEC, after filtering out the mediated effect through BC, is much larger for those with high or low BMI than those with healthy BMI (slope differential bp = .32). CONCLUSIONS: Exposure, even if unintentional, to food and nutrition information is an important predictor of HEC. BC, BS, and BMI are important factors that help to explain the process through which information affects behaviors.