Seasonality of Back Pain in Italy: An Infodemiology Study

Abstract

Background: E-health tools have been used to assess the temporal variations of different health problems. The aim of our infodemiology study was to investigate the seasonal pattern of search volumes for back pain in Italy. Methods: In Italian, back pain is indicated by the medical word “lombalgia”. Using Google Trends, we selected the three search terms related to “lombalgia” with higher relative search volumes (RSV), (namely, “mal di schiena”, “dolore alla schiena” and “dolore lombare”), representing the semantic preferences of users when performing web queries for back pain in Italy. Wikipedia page view statistics were used to identify the number of visits to the page “lombalgia”. Strength and direction of secular trends were assessed using the Mann–Kendall test. Cosinor analysis was used to evaluate the potential seasonality of back pain-related RSV. Results: We found a significant upward secular trend from 2005 to 2020 for search terms “mal di schiena” (τ = 0.734, p < 0.0001), “dolore alla schiena” (τ = 0.713, p < 0.0001) and “dolore lombare” (τ = 0.628, p < 0.0001). Cosinor analysis on Google Trends RSV showed a significant seasonality for the terms “mal di schiena” (pcos < 0.001), “dolore alla schiena” (pcos < 0.0001), “dolore lombare” (pcos < 0.0001) and “lombalgia” (pcos = 0.017). Cosinor analysis performed on views for the page “lombalgia” in Wikipedia confirmed a significant seasonality (pcos < 0.0001). Both analyses demonstrated a peak of interest in winter months and decrease in spring/summer. Conclusions: Our infodemiology approach revealed significant seasonal fluctuations in search queries for back pain in Italy, with peaking volumes during the coldest months of the year.

Invasive Meningococcal Disease and Meningococcal Serogroup B Vaccination in Adults and Their Offspring: Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices in Italy (2019)

“…An extensive representation of certain topics in the media may reasonably lead to overstating the true significance of this pathogen from a public health point of view [ 102 ]. While the appropriate measurement of the qualitative and quantitative coverage of a specific topic by conventional media is particularly difficult to achieve, Google Trends™ may represent a reliable proxy for new media coverage [ 103 , 104 , 105 , 106 ]. Google Trends TM is an open online tool [ 107 , 108 , 109 ], where web searches on a certain topic are reported as relative search volumes (RSV), i.e., the normalized value ranging from 0 to 100 and proportional to the ratio between the keyword-related queries and the total number of web queries.…”

Infodemiology of RSV in Italy (2017–2022): An Alternative Option for the Surveillance of Incident Cases in Pediatric Age?

“…In fact, all of the variables that were included in the analyses exhibited some sort of autocorrelation (See Appendix A ). Autocorrelation is sometimes known as serial correlation in the discrete time case, i.e., the correlation of a signal with a delayed copy of itself as a function of delay [ 32 , 33 , 34 ]. A high degree of autocorrelation, such as in our study, suggests that the data reflect an underlying cyclic pattern of events that actually drives the results.…”

“…While some observational studies based on the regional database have provided some snapshots of the clinical data [ 4 , 19 , 21 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ], alternative options for monitoring RSV infection trends are therefore required, at least until epidemiological and virological surveillance is able to deliver appropriate and reliable information. In recent years, infodemiology (i.e., the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy) [ 30 ] and infoveillance (i.e., epidemic surveillance performed by means of infodemiology) [ 31 , 32 ] have emerged as effective tools in predicting outbreaks of several infectious diseases, ranging from influenza to COVID-19 [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ]. The rationale of infodemiology is that the appropriate analysis of research trends in specific search engines, web platforms and social media may reflect or even anticipate the epidemiological features of certain disorders [ 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ].…”

Does Back Pain Go on Holiday in the Summer?

“…Seasonality in health conditions is difficult to investigate because following a sample of patients for one year may be challenging for both individuals and researchers. In recent years, different studies have investigated the seasonality of some musculoskeletal conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, and ankle and knee pain, unconventionally: through Google Trends searches [ 5 ]. Even if this approach does not represent a true disease expression, it reflects what users are interested in searching through Google and what they are probably experiencing at the moment of that search.…”

“…Even if this approach does not represent a true disease expression, it reflects what users are interested in searching through Google and what they are probably experiencing at the moment of that search. According to Ciaffi and colleagues [ 5 ], back pain appears to have seasonal fluctuations. Specifically, the summer represents the season with a lower volume of searches about back pain and other concerns.…”