Inpharma 1668 - 13 Dec 2008

Diagnosing disease from thecomfort of your own home . . .

More and more patients are using the World WideWeb to search for information about their health, withmany convincing themselves they are suffering fromserious illnesses, due to cyberchondria - "the unfoundedescalation of concerns about common symptomatology,based on the review of search results and literature on theWeb".

A team of Microsoft researchers studied health-related searches and conducted a survey of515 employees, asking questions regarding their health-related searching. They found that when individualsconducted searches regarding common symptoms suchas headache, there was a high probability of findinginformation related to serious conditions such as braintumours, with a probability of co-occurrence of theterms ’headache’ and ’brain tumor’ of 0.26 in thetop-10 Web search results, the same probability as co-occurrence of ’headache’ and ’caffeine withdrawal’.Searching for chest pain or muscle twitches could leadpatients to believe they were experiencing a heart attackor had a fatal neurodegenerative condition, rather thanmore likely explanations such as indigestion and musclestrain, respectively.

According to the results of the survey, three in fourrespondents have, at least once, "interpreted the rankingof Web search results as indicating the likelihood of theillnesses, with more likely diseases appearing higher upon the result page". Slightly less than one quarter ofrespondents frequently interpreted Web search resultsin this way, noted the researchers.White RW, et al. Cyberchondria: studies of the escalation of medical concerns inweb search. Internet Document : [32 pages], 2008. Available from: URL: http://research.microsoft.com 801108267

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Inpharma 13 Dec 2008 No. 16681173-8324/10/1668-0001/$14.95 Adis © 2010 Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved