Evaluating the Public's Interest in Testicle Tanning: Observational Study

A new and potentially dangerous health trend, testicle tanning, received extensive media attention following a popular television program where a health and fitness influencer touted that testicular tanning increases testosterone levels. It has been shown that the public has a particular interest in tanning wellness trends; thus, given the vague nomenclature of the practice, the abundance of misleading information and support for using UV light by other health influencers may lead to an increase in men exposing themselves to UV radiation and developing associated complications.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the public's interest in testicle tanning.

Relative search interest was collected from Google Trends, and daily tweet volume was collected using Twitter via Sprout Social. The search was filtered to observe internet activity between February 1, 2022, and August 18, 2022. Autoregressive integrated moving average models were applied to forecast the predicted values through April 30 to compare to the actual observed values immediately following the airing of the show.

We found that the relative search interest for testicle tanning peaked (100) on April 19, 2022, following a discussion of the topic on a television program. Compared to the forecasted relative search interest of 1.36 (95% CI -3.29 to 6.01), had the topic not been discussed, it showed a 7252% increase in relative search interest. A similar spike was observed in the volume of tweets peaking on April 18 with 42,736. The expected number of tweets from the autoregressive integrated moving average model was 122 (95% CI -154 to 397), representing a 35,053% increase.

Our results show that the promotion of testicle tanning generated significant public interest in an evidence-lacking and potentially dangerous health trend. Dermatologists and other health care professionals should be aware of these new viral health trends to best counsel patients and combat health misinformation.