Online Health Information Seeking Behaviour Due to COVID-19 Pandemic-Induced Health Related Anxiety among the General Population in India.
J Assoc Physicians India
; 70(1): 11-12, 2022 Jan.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35062803
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.
Buscar no Google
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Pandemias
/
COVID-19
Tipo de estudo:
Risk_factors_studies
Limite:
Humans
País como assunto:
Asia
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2022
Tipo de documento:
Article