How useful is Google Trends in evaluating public interest in neurosurgical diseases? (Preprint)

Abstract

The wide availability of the internet allows patients to read about diseases autonomously. Google Trends can observe these online behaviors.

We aimed to evaluate how useful Google Trends is on assessing public interest in neurosurgical diseases.

Five search terms were input into Google trends for web, image, and YouTube search: meningioma, glioma, brain hemorrhage, sciatica, and intracranial aneurysm. This data was compared with the respective total yearly scientific publications on PubMed and epidemiologic data from the Polish National Health Fund.

There was a rising worldwide interest in sciatica (r=0.93, P <0.001) followed by intracranial aneurysm (r=0.57, P<0.001), brain hemorrhage (r=0.41, P <0.001), glioma (r=0.29, P =0.009) and meningioma (r=0.26, P =0.02) on all three platforms. All neurosurgical publications observed a strong positive correlation with time; the strongest was with glioma (r=0.96, P <0.001) and meningioma (r=0.95, P <0.001). Glioma was searched for in high-income countries, sciatica from middle-income countries and only one low-income country had a top search. High-income South Korea and Poland presented the highest worldwide search interest in neurosurgical diseases. Polish web interest for all five keywords and the number of patients undergoing treatment for each respective disease was significantly related. Scientific publications for “glioma” (web P =0.008; YouTube P =0.01) and “intracranial aneurysm” (web P =0.003; YouTube P =0.0007) have followed the worldwide search interest on the web and on YouTube.

Google Trends not only offers insight into public health interests but could possibly be used to estimate the general rise and fall in incidence of a disease as in the case of Poland.