Google Trends can improve surveillance of Type 2 diabetes.

ABSTRACT: Recent studies demonstrate that people are increasingly looking online to assess their health, with reasons varying from personal preferences and beliefs to inability to book a timely appointment with their local medical practice. Records of these activities represent a new source of data about the health of populations, but which is currently unaccounted for by disease surveillance models. This could potentially be useful as evidence of individuals' perception of bodily changes and self-diagnosis of early symptoms of an emerging disease. We make use of the Experian geodemographic Mosaic dataset in order to extract Type 2 diabetes candidate risk variables and compare their temporal relationships with the search keywords, used to describe early symptoms of the disease on Google. Our results

SUBMITTER: Tkachenko N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5504026 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature