Background With the increasing health care burden of cancer, public health organizations are increasingly emphasizing the importance of calling people to engage in long-term prevention and periodical detection. How to best deliver behavioral recommendations and health outcomes in messaging is an important issue. Objective This study aims to disaggregate the effects of gain-framed and loss-framed messages on cancer prevention and detection behaviors and intentions and attitudes, which has the potential to inform cancer control programs. Methods A search of three electronic databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed) was conducted for studies published between January 2000 and December 2020. After a good agreement achieved on a sample by two authors, the article selection (κ=0.8356), quality assessment (κ=0.8137), and data extraction (κ=0.9804) were mainly performed by one author. The standardized mean difference (attitude and intention) and the odds ratio (behaviors) were calculated to evaluate the effectiveness of message framing (gain-framed message and loss-framed message). Calculations were conducted, and figures were produced by Review Manager 5.3. Results The title and abstract of 168 unique citations were scanned, of which 53 were included for a full-text review. A total of 24 randomized controlled trials were included, predominantly examining message framing on cancer prevention and detection behavior change interventions. There were 9 studies that used attitude to predict message framing effect and 16 studies that used intention, whereas 6 studies used behavior to examine the message framing effect directly. The use of loss-framed messages improved cancer detection behavior (OR 0.76, 95% CI 0.64-0.90; P=.001), and the results from subgroup analysis indicated that the effect would be weak with time. No effect of framing was found when effectiveness was assessed by attitudes (prevention: SMD=0.02, 95% CI –0.13 to 0.17; P=.79; detection: SMD=–0.05, 95% CI –0.15 to 0.05; P=.32) or intentions (prevention: SMD=–0.05, 95% CI –0.19 to 0.09; P=.48; detection: SMD=0.02, 95% CI –0.26 to 0.29; P=.92) among studies encouraging cancer prevention and cancer detection. Conclusions Research has shown that it is almost impossible to change people's attitudes or intentions about cancer prevention and detection with a gain-framed or loss-framed message. However, loss-framed messages have achieved preliminary success in persuading people to adopt cancer detection behaviors. Future studies could improve the intervention design to achieve better intervention effectiveness.

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BACKGROUND With the increase in the cancer burden, public health organizations are increasingly emphasizing the importance of calling people to take long-term prevention and periodical detection. An important issue that how to construct behavioral recommendations and health outcomes in messages. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine the message framing effect to persuade people of cancer prevention and detection. METHODS Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed 3 electronic databases (from 2000 to 2020) were searched. Studies were appraised for quality using the Modified Jadad Scale. Data analyzed by random-effects models in meta-analysis. RESULTS 24 studies met the criteria for meta-analysis and represented data from the type of persuasiveness (attitude, intention, behavior) and conducted pre-planned subgroup analyses based on the type of cancer-related health behavior (prevention, detection). A loss-framed message is more likely than a gain-framed message to encourage cancer detection behaviors (OR=0.79, 95%CI 0.69 to 0.90, p=0.001), particularly breast cancer and cervical cancer, and the effects will be weak with time. No effect of framing was found when persuasion was assessed by attitudes/intentions or among studies encouraging cancer prevention and cancer detection. CONCLUSIONS Research has shown that it is impossible to change people's attitudes or intentions towards cancer prevention and detection with gain or loss-framed messages, but the loss framing does affect persuading people to adopt cancer detection behaviors.