Effectiveness of behavioural economics-based interventions to improve colorectal cancer screening participation: A rapid systematic review of randomised controlled trials

Background: While colorectal cancer screening has proven to improve patient outcomes, participation rates are often below recommended levels. There is, therefore, strong interest in developing interventions to improve uptake. Recently new interventions based on based on behavioural economics (BE) have been proposed, exploiting shortcuts in thinking processes (heuristics). The aim of this review is to assess whether BE interventions are effective at changing CRC screening behaviours in randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Methods: A rapid review method was used to review the literature, starting with a narrow search string and systematically widening it until <1% of the new papers were eligible upon title and abstract review. Study characteristics and primary results were extracted for eligible papers and reported using descriptive statistics. Results: A total of 30 papers were included in the review covering 6 different components. The most investigated BE component was incentives (N=11, 37%), and the least investigated was primers (N=1, 3%). In total, 60% (N=18) of studies reported positive results and the remaining papers reported no effect on screening behaviour (N=12, 40%). Interventions involving the messenger, employing a primer or changing the default setting were most likely to generate positive effects. Study characteristics varied in location and screening test. More than half (N=17, 57%) were conducted in the United States and 27 (90%) involved screening with home-based faecal tests. Conclusions: This review found mixed evidence to support the use of BE interventions to promote the uptake of CRC screening. Further research is needed to investigate the impact on different population subgroups.

TAYLOR Lily;  KERRISON Robert S.;  HERRMANN Benedikt;  STOFFEL Sandro; 

2022-11-14

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE

JRC126563

0091-7435 (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211335522000547,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC126563,   

10.1016/j.pmedr.2022.101747 (online),