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Internet searches by the Spanish population for unqualified information on the treatment of osteoarthritis
C D Novoa-Parra1, R Sanjuan-Cerveró1, N Franco-Ferrando1
1Servicio de Cirugía Ortopédica y Traumatología, Hospital de Denia, Alicante, España.
Objective:
There is a current trend in the population to search the Internet for unqualified medical information that may affect the recommendations given in specialist consultation. The aim of this study was to analyse the tendency of the Spanish population to search the Internet for unqualified information on current treatments for osteoarthritis.
Material And Method:
Google Trends was used analyse the information gathered from the Internet, combining potential key search terms related to the current treatment of osteoarthritis. For each term the relative search volume was calculated, and its trend between 2009 and 2019. Spearman's correlation was used to study the direction of the trend.
Results:
All the infiltration methods had increasing trends and no statistically significant differences were found between them (P=.769). The term that showed the best correlation over time was «prp» with Spearman's correlation =.90, and the term with the highest relative search volume was «growth factors». Prosthetic treatment generated more interest than conservative treatments, where there was more interest in knee replacement than hip replacement (P<.001).
Conclusion:
In Spain, the search for unqualified information on the treatment of osteoarthritis has increased over the past 10 years. There is more interest in prosthetic treatment than the more conservative treatments. There is more interest in knee replacement than hip replacement. There are no differences with regard to the different methods of joint injections.
