Information Seeking Regarding Tobacco and Lung Cancer: Effects of Seasonality

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Abstract

This paper conducted one of the first comprehensive international Internet analyses of seasonal patterns in information seeking concerning tobacco and lung cancer. Search query data for the terms “tobacco” and “lung cancer” from January 2004 to January 2014 was collected from Google Trends. The relevant countries included the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and China. Two statistical approaches including periodogram and cross-correlation were applied to analyze seasonal patterns in the collected search trends and their associations. For these countries except China, four out of six cross-correlations of seasonal components of the search trends regarding tobacco were above 0.600. For these English-speaking countries, similar patterns existed in the data concerning lung cancer, and all cross-correlations between seasonal components of the search trends regarding tobacco and that regarding lung cancer were also above 0.700. Seasonal patterns widely exist in information seeking concerning tobacco and lung cancer on an international scale. The findings provide a piece of novel Internet-based evidence for the seasonality and health effects of tobacco use.

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Infodemiology: tracking flu-related searches on the web for syndromic surveillance.

Gunther Eysenbach (2006)

Syndromic surveillance uses health-related data that precede diagnosis and signal a sufficient probability of a case or an outbreak to warrant further public health response. While most syndromic surveillance systems rely on data from clinical encounters with health professionals, I started to explore in 2004 whether analysis of trends in Internet searches can be useful to predict outbreaks such as influenza epidemics and prospectively gathered data on Internet search trends for this purpose. There is an excellent correlation between the number of clicks on a keyword-triggered link in Google with epidemiological data from the flu season 2004/2005 in Canada (Pearson correlation coefficient of current week clicks with the following week influenza cases r=.91). The "Google ad sentinel method" proved to be more timely, more accurate and - with a total cost of Can$365.64 for the entire flu-season - considerably cheaper than the traditional method of reports on influenza-like illnesses observed in clinics by sentinel physicians. Systematically collecting and analyzing health information demand data from the Internet has considerable potential to be used for syndromic surveillance. Tracking web searches on the Internet has the potential to predict population-based events relevant for public health purposes, such as real outbreaks, but may also be confounded by "epidemics of fear". Data from such "infodemiology studies" should also include longitudinal data on health information supply.

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Tracking the rise in popularity of electronic nicotine delivery systems (electronic cigarettes) using search query surveillance.

John Ayers, Kurt M. Ribisl, John Brownstein (2011)

Public interest in electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) is undocumented. By monitoring search queries, ENDS popularity and correlates of their popularity were assessed in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom (UK), and the U.S. English-language Google searches conducted from January 2008 through September 2010 were compared to snus, nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), and Chantix® or Champix®. Searches for each week were scaled to the highest weekly search proportion (100), with lower values indicating the relative search proportion compared to the highest-proportion week (e.g., 50=50% of the highest observed proportion). Analyses were performed in 2010. From July 2008 through February 2010, ENDS searches increased in all nations studied except Australia, there an increase occurred more recently. By September 2010, ENDS searches were several-hundred-fold greater than searches for smoking alternatives in the UK and U.S., and were rivaling alternatives in Australia and Canada. Across nations, ENDS searches were highest in the U.S., followed by similar search intensity in Canada and the UK, with Australia having the fewest ENDS searches. Stronger tobacco control, created by clean indoor air laws, cigarette taxes, and anti-smoking populations, were associated with consistently higher levels of ENDS searches. The online popularity of ENDS has surpassed that of snus and NRTs, which have been on the market for far longer, and is quickly outpacing Chantix or Champix. In part, the association between ENDS's popularity and stronger tobacco control suggests ENDS are used to bypass, or quit in response to, smoking restrictions. Search query surveillance is a valuable, real-time, free, and public method to evaluate the diffusion of new health products. This method may be generalized to other behavioral, biological, informational, or psychological outcomes manifested on search engines. Copyright © 2011 American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Do Seasons Have an Influence on the Incidence of Depression? The Use of an Internet Search Engine Query Data as a Proxy of Human Affect

Albert Yang, Norden Huang, Chung Peng … (2010)

Background Seasonal depression has generated considerable clinical interest in recent years. Despite a common belief that people in higher latitudes are more vulnerable to low mood during the winter, it has never been demonstrated that human's moods are subject to seasonal change on a global scale. The aim of this study was to investigate large-scale seasonal patterns of depression using Internet search query data as a signature and proxy of human affect. Methodology/Principal Findings Our study was based on a publicly available search engine database, Google Insights for Search, which provides time series data of weekly search trends from January 1, 2004 to June 30, 2009. We applied an empirical mode decomposition method to isolate seasonal components of health-related search trends of depression in 54 geographic areas worldwide. We identified a seasonal trend of depression that was opposite between the northern and southern hemispheres; this trend was significantly correlated with seasonal oscillations of temperature (USA: r = −0.872, p<0.001; Australia: r = −0.656, p<0.001). Based on analyses of search trends over 54 geological locations worldwide, we found that the degree of correlation between searching for depression and temperature was latitude-dependent (northern hemisphere: r = −0.686; p<0.001; southern hemisphere: r = 0.871; p<0.0001). Conclusions/Significance Our findings indicate that Internet searches for depression from people in higher latitudes are more vulnerable to seasonal change, whereas this phenomenon is obscured in tropical areas. This phenomenon exists universally across countries, regardless of language. This study provides novel, Internet-based evidence for the epidemiology of seasonal depression.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Tobias Preis: Role: Academic Editor

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PLoS One

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): PLoS ONE

Journal ID (publisher-id): plos

Journal ID (pmc): plosone

Title: PLoS ONE

Publisher: Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )

ISSN (Electronic): 1932-6203

Publication date (Electronic): 17 March 2015

Publication date Collection: 2015

Volume: 10

Issue: 3

Electronic Location Identifier: e0117938

Affiliations

[1 ]The State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

[2 ]Department of Management Information Systems, The University of Arizona, Tucson, United States of America

[3 ]Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale, Arizona, United States of America

University of Warwick, UNITED KINGDOM

Author notes

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Conceived and designed the experiments: ZZ DDZ SJL. Performed the experiments: ZZ. Analyzed the data: ZZ XZ SJL. Wrote the paper: ZZ XZ SJL.

* E-mail: dajun.zeng@ 123456ia.ac.cn

Article

Publisher ID: PONE-D-14-36253

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0117938

PMC ID: 4364309

PubMed ID: 25781020

SO-VID: a0fb800e-b541-49b0-aa7b-fa786bde2ae7

License:

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

History

Date received : 12 August 2014

Date accepted : 4 January 2015

Page count

Figures: 3, Tables: 3, Pages: 11

Funding

This research is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China ( http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/) under Grant No. 71103180 (PI: XZ), 71472175 (PI: XZ), 71025001 (PI: DDZ), 91224008 (PI: DDZ), and 61175040 (PI: WM); National Institutes of Health (NIH) of USA ( http://www.nih.gov/) under Grant No. 1R01DA037378-01 (PI: DDZ); the Ministry of Health of China ( http://www.nhfpc.gov.cn/) under Grant No. 2012ZX10004801 (PI: DDZ) and 2013ZX10004218 (PI: DDZ); and by the Grant No. 2013A127 (PI: DDZ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Data Availability All relevant data is within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Information Seeking Regarding Tobacco and Lung Cancer: Effects of Seasonality

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Most cited references 11

Infodemiology: tracking flu-related searches on the web for syndromic surveillance.

Tracking the rise in popularity of electronic nicotine delivery systems (electronic cigarettes) using search query surveillance.

Do Seasons Have an Influence on the Incidence of Depression? The Use of an Internet Search Engine Query Data as a Proxy of Human Affect

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