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Updated: Sep 10, 2025

Author Spotlight: Quantifying Pain Experience – An Illustrative Approach Using the Pain Body Diagram
Published on: July 7, 2023
Use of Google Trends to investigate "Pain" Searches Over 24 Hours
Jacek Stańdo1, Żywilla Fechner2, Magdalena Kocot-Kępska3
1Centre fo Mathematics and Physics, Lodz University of Technology, Lodz, Poland.
Background:
The Google Trends tool can be used in medical research to monitor and analyze health trends and patient behavior, but no studies analyzing diurnal patterns in queries related to pain have been done so far.
Objectives:
The aim of the study was to analyze the temporal pattern of daily and weekly pain information searches in selected European countries. We measured the search for information about pain by analyzing the search volume for the term "pain" in the Google search engine, depending on the time of day.
Methods:
We used data reported by Google Trends (GT) to identify and analyze global interest in pain from January 9, 2023, to July 3, 2023, between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Results:
We showed for the first time that searches for the term "pain" in individual national languages in selected European countries were characterized by diurnal and weekly seasonality patterns, with most countries' searches peaking between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. Moreover, in all surveyed countries except Slovakia, searches for the phrase "pain" show a decreasing trend from Monday to Friday until the afternoon, and then an increase in interest in searching for the term "pain" is observed during the weekend. Our data may confirm the close correlations between pain sensation under physiological and pathological conditions and diurnal rhythms in humans, but moreover, clearly show the weekly seasonality of pain sensations in developed countries, which has not been extensively studied and taken into consideration in health care systems so far.
Conclusions:
The results of our study may show new epidemiological patterns in pain medicine, confirm correlations between pain and sleep quality in real life, and can contribute to creating well-developed and evidence-based resources by policymakers and the pain medicine community.
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