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. 2022 Jul 22;19(15):8934.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph19158934.

Seasonal Patterns and Trends in Dermatoses in Poland

Krzysztof Bartosz Klimiuk  1 , Dawid Krefta  2 , Karol Kołkowski  3 , Karol Flisikowski  4 , Małgorzata Sokołowska-Wojdyło  5 , Łukasz Balwicki  6
Affiliations

Seasonal Patterns and Trends in Dermatoses in Poland

Krzysztof Bartosz Klimiuk et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Background: The amount of data available online is constantly increasing, including search behavior and tracking trends in domains such as Google. Analyzing the data helps to predict patient needs and epidemiological events more accurately. Our study aimed to identify dermatology-related terms that occur seasonally and any search anomalies during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Methods: The data were gathered using Google Trends, with 69 entries between January-2010 and December-2020 analyzed. We conducted the Seasonal Mann-Kendal Test to determine the strength of trends. The month with the highest seasonal component (RSV) and the lowest seasonal component (RSV) was indicated for every keyword. Groups of keywords occurring together regularly at specific periods of the year were shown.

Results: We found that some topics were seasonally searched in winter (e.g., herpes, scabies, candida) and others in summer (e.g., erythema, warts, urticaria).

Conclusions: Interestingly, downward trends in searches on sexually transmitted diseases in comparison with increased infection rates reported officially show a strong need for improved sexual education in Poland. There were no significant differences in trends for coronavirus-related cutaneous symptoms during 2020. We have shown that the seasonality of dermatologically related terms searched in Poland via Google did not differ significantly during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Keywords: Google Trends; STD; dermatoses; infodemiology; seasonality; trends.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Time series plots for relative search volumes on dermatological topics. The horizontal axis is the date (January-2010–December-2020) and the vertical axis is the value of relative search volume.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Calendar representation of seasonal components of relative search volumes on dermatological diseases/symptoms. The darkest color corresponds to the highest value of the seasonal component (the month when symptoms are most searched for) and the lightest color corresponds to the lowest value of the seasonal component. Vertical orange lines indicate the division of months into seasons: spring (March, April, May), summer (June, July, August), autumn (September, October, November, December), winter (December, January, February).
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