What is the Color of Cancer?
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Objective: To investigate the colors that evokes cancer in the patients with prostate, lung and breast cancer, and in healthy controls. Materials and Methods: A visual card in one of the 9 colors (white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, navy, black) was shown to totally 210 patients diagnosed with lung cancer (LC), prostate cancer (PC) or breast cancer (BC) and 200 healthy participants and the question of What is the color of cancer? was asked to them. Disease information of the cancer patients were also recorded. Results: The mean ages of the patient and control groups were 61.54 and 20.49, respectively (p<0.001). While the most preferred color was yellow (24.8%) in the patient group, it was red (39%) in the control group. The patients were divided into three groups according to both type and stage of cancer. While the patients with PC and BC selected yellow color, the patients with LC selected black color. The patients without recurrent and residual diseases preferred yellow, patients with local recurrence preferred red and patients with distant metastasis preferred black colors. Conclusion: While cancer patients selected yellow color which represents positive emotions, the healthy young individuals selected red color which represents negative emotions. However, progressive or aggressive cancer patients selected red and black colors which is associated with negative emotions.