Myocardial infarction in COVID-19 era: Google Trends data analysis
Description
The COVID-19 pandemic has put healthcare systems worldwide under huge strain, resulting in a significant loss of their capacity and availability. Any interaction with healthcare professionals appears for some patients to be potentially dangerous as increasing the risk of COVID-19 infection. Patients have become more reluctant to contact their doctors or call an ambulance in case of myocardial infarction (MI) symptoms onset. It has been accompanied by a significant decrease in the number of coronary angiography and PCI procedures performed. The aim of the study is to evaluate the role of online health information in the patient-dependent phase of MI management during the COVID-19 lockdown in Europe. The Google Trends data on the popularity of phrases related to MI symptoms, respiratory tract infection, urological complaints, and terms unrelated to health, for the period of the first COVID-19 lockdown, along with the data from the corresponding weeks from 2017-2019 in seven European countries, were collected and analyzed. The findings suggest that during lockdown patients presenting MI symptoms might have been trying to solve their problem on their own, using information from the Internet. This demonstrates the growing role of the Internet in patient’s decision-making process in the emergency situation, which indicates the rising need for reliable and freely available online information provided by healthcare professionals. Data identification (ID): ID code: "Query" "Country" "data type" Abbreviations (Abbr.) applied: 1. Queries: chest pain (cp), shortness of breath (sh), fear (fe), palpitations (pa), myocardial infarction symptoms (hs), cough (co), runny nose (ru), fever (fev), sore throat (st), kidney stones (ks), blood in urine (bu), cystitis (bi), frequent urination (rf), Alexander the Great (ag), hard disk (hd), squirrel (sq), pear (pr) 2. Countries: United Kingdom (en), Spain (sp), France (fr), Germany (de), Italy (it), Poland (pl), Russia (ru) 3. Data type: raw (), adjusted (adj) eg. "ks fr adj" -> kidney stones - France - adjusted
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See: Data acquisition plan, data acquisition details, and analytic code