Impact of the World Inflammatory Bowel Disease Day and Crohn’s and Colitis Awareness Week on Population Interest Between 2016 and 2020: Google Trends Analysis

Abstract

Background More than 6 million people are affected by inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) globally. The World IBD Day (WID, May 19) and Crohn’s and Colitis Awareness Week (CCAW, December 1-7) occur yearly as national health observances to raise public awareness of IBD, but their effects are unclear. Objective The aim of this study was to analyze the relationship between WID or CCAW and the public health awareness on IBD represented by the Google search engine query data. Methods This study evaluates the impact of WID and CCAW on the public awareness of IBD in the United States and worldwide from 2016 to 2020 by using the relative search volume of “IBD,” “ulcerative colitis,” and “Crohn’s disease” in Google Trends. To identify significant time points of trend changes (joinpoints), we performed joinpoint regression analysis. Results No joinpoints were noted around the time of WID or CCAW during the study period in the search results of the United States. Worldwide, joinpoints were noted around WID in 2020 with the search for “IBD” and around CCAW in 2017 and 2019 with the search for “ulcerative colitis.” However, the extents of trend changes were modest without statistically significant increases. Conclusions These results posed a question that WID and CCAW might not have worked as expected to raise public awareness of IBD. Additional studies are needed to precisely estimate the impact of health observances to raise the awareness of IBD.

European national health plans and the monitoring of online searches for information on diabetes mellitus in different European healthcare systems

“…Our research work demonstrates the potential of analyzing user activity collected through Google and GT. Our results concur with those of prior research (33,36,40,43), and it emphasizes the importance of OHISB evaluation in current days for raising public awareness of specific health issues (37,(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45). Furthermore, our study is novel as it evaluates the impact of OHISB on the WDMD considering selected European countries and depending on whether they have NPHs or not, their healthcare system model, and the prevalence of DM among the population.…”

Impact of Breast Cancer Awareness Month on Public Interest in the United States between 2012 and 2021: A Google Trends Analysis

“…Of note, the RSVs for breast, lung, and prostate cancers in the U.S. shot up around the 15th week of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, although BCAM continued to be associated with increasing RSVs of breast cancer in 2020, unlike the other two awareness months. The dramatic increases in the RSVs for the cancers could be related to concerns among the general public that those who are immunocompromised might be more vulnerable to COVID-19, as seen in the data set in inflammatory bowel diseases [24]. However, contrasting data from Canada showed that interest in various cancers temporarily decreased during the early pandemic [27].…”

“…Google Trends, a publicly available data source generated based on the total Google search data [10], has been utilized for social and behavioral health research [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. This analysis enables us to determine the relative popularity of specific search terms in a particular category (for example, "health"), place, and time range, suggesting how popular the terms are at a specific time point.…”

Commensal Intestinal Protozoa—Underestimated Members of the Gut Microbial Community

“…Moreover, chronic inflammation in IBD has been associated with serious, often fatal comorbidities, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and liver diseases [ 11 , 12 ]. The rate of incidence of IBD has been rising dramatically since the industrial revolution, with a current global burden of more than 6 million people [ 13 ]. Although the IBD etiology remains largely unknown, it has been hypothesized that the industrial lifestyle, which includes increased use of antibiotics and a diet rich in highly processed foods, has resulted in detrimental changes to the intestinal microbiota that significantly contribute to disease risk [ 9 , 14 ].…”