Online Health Information Seeking Behaviour Due to COVID-19 Pandemic-Induced Health Related Anxiety among the General Population in India.

Bright Heber R, Chandy Sujith J, Rajkumar Pradeep, Dona Maria Philip

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)11-12
Number of pages2
JournalJournal of Association of Physicians of India
Volume70
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2022

Keywords

  • Anxiety/epidemiology
  • COVID-19
  • Humans
  • India/epidemiology
  • Information Seeking Behavior
  • Pandemics
  • SARS-CoV-2

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Online Health Information Seeking Behaviour Due to COVID-19 Pandemic-Induced Health Related Anxiety among the General Population in India.'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this