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Anomalous asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease Google Trends patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic

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dc.contributor.author Sousa Pinto, Bernardo
dc.contributor.author Heffler, Enrico
dc.contributor.author Antó, Aram
dc.contributor.author Czarlewski, Wienczyslawa
dc.contributor.author Bedbrook, Anna
dc.contributor.author Gemicioglu, Bilun
dc.contributor.author Canonica, G. Walter
dc.contributor.author Antó i Boqué, Josep Maria
dc.contributor.author Almeida Fonseca, João
dc.contributor.author Bousquet, Jean
dc.date.accessioned 2020-12-15T08:08:28Z
dc.date.available 2020-12-15T08:08:28Z
dc.date.issued 2020
dc.identifier.citation Sousa-Pinto B, Heffler E, Antó A, Czarlewski W, Bedbrook A, Gemicioglu B, Canonica GW, Antó JM, Fonseca JA, Bousquet J. Anomalous asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease Google Trends patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clin Transl Allergy. 2020; 10(1):47. DOI: 10.1186/s13601-020-00352-9
dc.identifier.issn 2045-7022
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/46042
dc.description.abstract Background: An increase in online searches on health topics may either mirror epidemiological changes or reflect media coverage. In the context of COVID-19, this is particularly relevant, as COVID-19 symptoms may be mistaken for those of respiratory disease exacerbations. Therefore, we aimed to assess Internet search patterns on asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in the context of COVID-19, as compared to searches on other chronic diseases. Methods: We retrieved Google Trends (GTs) data on two respiratory (asthma and COPD) and three non-respiratory (diabetes, hypertension, and Crohn's disease) chronic diseases over the past 5 years (up to May 31, 2020). For 54 countries, and for each disease, we built autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models to predict GTs for 2020 based on 2015-2019 search patterns. In addition, we estimated the proportion of searches in which COVID-19-related terms were used. To assess the potential impact of media coverage on online searches, we assessed whether weekly "asthma" GTs correlated with the number of Google News items on asthma. Results: Over the past 5 years, worldwide search volumes for asthma and COPD reached their maximum values in March 2020. Such was not observed for diabetes, hypertension and Crohn's disease. In 38 (70%) countries, GTs on asthma were higher in March 2020 than the respective maximum predicted values. This compares to 19 countries for COPD, 23 for hypertension, 11 for Crohn's disease, and 9 for diabetes. Queries with COVID-19-related terms represented up to 47.8% of the monthly searches on asthma, and up to 21.3% of COPD searches. In most of the assessed countries, moderate-strong correlations were observed between "asthma" GTs and the number of news items on asthma. Conclusions: During March 2020, there was a peak in searches on asthma and COPD, which was probably mostly driven by media coverage, as suggested by their simultaneity in several countries with different epidemiological situations.
dc.description.sponsorship This paper was written by five members of DigitalHealthEurope Grant Agreement Number: 826353 Support to a Digital Health and Care Innovation initiative in the context of Digital Single Market strategy, SC1-HCC-05-2018. Publication of this article was supported by National Funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within CINTESIS, R&D Unit (reference UIDB/4255/2020).
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.language.iso eng
dc.publisher BioMed Central
dc.relation.ispartof Clin Transl Allergy. 2020; 10(1):47
dc.rights © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data ma
dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.title Anomalous asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease Google Trends patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic
dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13601-020-00352-9
dc.subject.keyword Asthma
dc.subject.keyword COVID-19
dc.subject.keyword Chronic diseases
dc.subject.keyword Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
dc.subject.keyword Google trends
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/826353
dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

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