Abstract
BACKGROUND: Persons with anxiety regarding health may have an increased tendency to seek online health information especially during a pandemic. The primary objective of this study was to determine COVID-19 induced health anxiety among the general population in India using Google Trends data.
METHODS: Online health information seeking behaviour with respect to high-risk comorbid conditions for severe COVID-19 disease during the pandemic period was compared to that of the previous year. Correlation between the COVID-19 incidence and online health information seeking behaviour was also computed to explore if the observed health anxiety was due to the pandemic.
RESULTS: Overall, the online health information seeking behaviour was highest for diabetes both during (81.46±8.84) and before the pandemic (64.47±9.48). A significant increase (p<0.001) in the information seeking behaviour during the pandemic was observed with all the four high-risk comorbid conditions including diabetes (+16.99), hypertension (+22.57), lung disease (+21.79), and cardiovascular disease (+14.08). The behaviour with respect to diabetes (r=0.39), hypertension (r=0.48) and lung disease (r=0.69) showed significant positive correlation with the COVID-19 incidence. The observed health anxiety was regardless of prevalence, urbanization and literacy rates of individual states.
CONCLUSIONS: The general population in India has increased its online health information seeking behaviour during the pandemic and this may be due to an underlying health anxiety due to COVID-19.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 11-12 |
Number of pages | 2 |
Journal | Journal of Association of Physicians of India |
Volume | 70 |
Issue number | 1 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2022 |
Keywords
- Anxiety/epidemiology
- COVID-19
- Humans
- India/epidemiology
- Information Seeking Behavior
- Pandemics
- SARS-CoV-2