Clinical Diagnoses (Self-Reported)

As part of the C8 Health Project, participants were asked to complete questions about their own medical history, including medical diagnoses and conditions. The results reported on this page represent conditions and diagnoses as reported by the participants themselves. These diagnoses have not been verified by a clinician, or by review of medical documentation, and therefore are to be considered only as accurate as the participants' self-reports and / or their understanding of the survey question as asked.

Information on diagnoses verified through review of medical chart documentation are reported elsewhere within this website.


Summary Results for Self-Reported Diagnoses

Congenital Malformations, Deformations and Chromosomal Abnormalities (Birth Defects)

Diseases of the Blood and Blood-Forming Organs and Certain Disorders Involving the Immune Mechanism

Diseases of the Circulatory System

Diseases of the Digestive System

Diseases of the Genitourinary System

Diseases of the Musculoskeletal System and Connective Tissue

Diseases of the Respiratory System

Diseases of the Skin and Subcutaneous Tissue

Diseases of the Nervous System

Endocrine, Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases

Infectious Diseases

Mental and Behavioral Disorders

Neoplasms (Cancer)

Special Explanatory Note for Understanding and Interpreting Self-Reported Cancer Summaries: Cancer questions pose a number of challenges to survey respondents. Below are outlined 3 considerations when viewing and interpreting the following graphs summarizing the results for self-reported cancer diagnoses. These limitations are recognized by experts as inherent when using a self-reported survey research process, such as that used with the C8 Health Project, especially when the topic is cancer. These considerations do not diminish the value of the summary information reported here, rather it simply needs to be understood in order to accurately and responsibly interpret the information.

First, the summaries reported here are for self-reported cancer diagnoses. Cancer diagnoses were validated with medical record review. As with self-report for any diagnosis, the patient's understanding of their diagnosis may differ from the clinical interpretation of this diagnosis. This includes the patient's understanding of a 'secondary' cancer. A diagnosis of a second cancer may or may not be a metastatic cancer.

Second, the date of cancer diagnosis could have been at any time in the past. Thus, these summaries represent the cumulative number of self-reported cancer diagnoses at any point in the lifetime of study participants. This is different from a summary of people who currently have cancer, the traditional epidemiologic understanding of " cancer prevalence", or the number of newly diagnosed cancer cases in the past year, the traditional epidemiologic understanding of "annual cancer incidence".

Third, a very important limitation to these summaries, is that all participants in the C8 Health Project were living, thus only cancer survivors completed this survey. Therefore, survivable cancers (such as testicular cancer and cervical cancer) are likely more represented than lethal cancers. It may be, then, that the number of cancer diagnoses reported in the summaries reported here are higher (or lower) than prevalence or incidence rates for this population reported elsewhere, depending upon the cancer reported.