Estimation of Asthma Symptom Onset Using Internet Search Queries: Lag-Time Series Analysis

Yulin Hswen, Amanda Zhang and Bruno Ventelou
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Yulin Hswen: AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Departments of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Biostatistics - UCSF
Amanda Zhang: Harvard University - Department of Mathematics - Harvard University

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Abstract: Background Asthma affects over 330 million people worldwide. Timing of an asthma event is extremely important and lack of identification of asthma increases the risk of death. A major challenge for health systems is the length of time between symptom onset and care seeking, which could result in delayed treatment initiation and worsening of symptoms. Objective This study evaluates the utility of the internet search query data for the identification of the onset of asthma symptoms. Methods Pearson correlation coefficients between the time series of hospital admissions and Google searches were computed at lag times from 4 weeks before hospital admission to 4 weeks after hospital admission. An autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMAX) model with an autoregressive process at lags of 1 and 2 and Google searches at weeks –1 and –2 as exogenous variables were conducted to validate our correlation results. Results Google search volume for asthma had the highest correlation at 2 weeks before hospital admission. The ARIMAX model using an autoregressive process showed that the relative searches from Google about asthma were significant at lags 1 (P

Keywords: digital epidemiology; Google queries; asthma; symptoms; health information seeking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-05
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://amu.hal.science/hal-03276525
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Published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 2021, 7 (5), pp.e18593. ⟨10.2196/18593⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03276525

DOI: 10.2196/18593

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