Abstract
Google Trends provides new evidence for public interest and seasonal patterns in COPD http://bit.ly/2xsGbIE
To the Editor:
We read the recent article published in the European Respiratory Journal by Boehm et al. [1] with great interest: their study is the first to explore global chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) awareness using Google searches. Currently, with the development of the internet and search engines, Google Trends has emerged as a robust tool to investigate the interest of the general population in medical conditions [2–4]. In the study by Boehm et al. [1], it was found that the awareness of COPD in the real world is rising, while it is highly under-represented in the public interest compared with other common conditions. In addition, public interest in seeking COPD information through Google searches presented a seasonal pattern, with peaks in the first and the fourth quarter of the year. These findings may help to improve programmes to guide interventions for COPD and contribute to the development of preventative healthcare for this disease.
Overall, the rationale, research design and statistical analysis of this study was clearly defined and appropriate, and the conclusions are supported by the results. Nevertheless, it would be more interesting to incorporate some key points in this study. First, the interest by region option was set to worldwide, thus, lacking a trend analysis of relative search volume of specific countries in the northern and southern hemisphere, respectively. Second, the survey did not state which category the assessment of search interest was based on (i.e. “all categories” or “health” categories), which may not be strict enough. Third, the findings of the study would be more comprehensive if it included the analysis of both “hot topics” and “top rising topics” [5]. The “hot topics” are the most popular topics or terms, while the “top rising topics” are terms with the largest increase in search frequency since the last period of time. In particular, analysis of “top rising topics” can give guidance for medical staff to provide their patients with valuable information.
Taken together, this Google Trends-based investigation provided new evidence for public interest and seasonal patterns in COPD. The findings of this study may serve as the basis for future studies to explore the association between Internet searches and actual clinical trends. However, more comprehensive analysis on COPD-related topics, including “hot topics” and “top rising topics”, and trend analyses of the northern and southern hemispheres, are needed to derive a more precise evaluation of global COPD awareness.
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Supplementary Material
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Footnotes
Conflict of interest: C-N. Zhao has nothing to disclose.
Conflict of interest: Q. Wu has nothing to disclose.
Conflict of interest: H-F. Pan has nothing to disclose.
- Received May 31, 2019.
- Accepted June 6, 2019.
- Copyright ©ERS 2019