Top searches on health topics? It may depend on where you live

You can learn a lot about a person’s medical concerns by looking at the health topics they’ve searched for online. It’s fascinating (and a bit creepy) to take a peek at what others are searching — and to compare what you find to what sends you online. I’ve posted before about how the health issues people report worrying about the most differ from those that are most common, deadly, or have the biggest impact on quality of life. There’s overlap, of course, but certain important conditions (such as lung disease, the third leading cause of death in 2015) did not make the top 10 list of health concerns in a 2015 survey. In that same post, I discussed how causes of death varied among states. For example, bicycle-related deaths occurred more often in Florida, and deaths due to accidents involving machinery were highest in Iowa and North Dakota. While we can probably come up with reasonable explanations for these, the higher rate of accidental suffocation in Connecticut is perplexing. Health concerns as reflected by searches on health topics A new study looks at searches for health information online and how that varies between states. The results are intriguing — and in many cases, quite difficult to understand. Analyzing health-related Google searches by state, researchers found that: The top searches were for ADHD (nine states), syphilis (six states), and HIV/AIDS (four states). This makes sense considering that nearly 10% of school-age children have been diagnosed...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Source Type: blogs