Inpharma 1668 - 13 Dec 2008

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Diagnosing disease from the comfort of your own home . . . More and more patients are using the World Wide Web to search for information about their health, with many convincing themselves they are suffering from serious illnesses, due to cyberchondria - "the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web". A team of Microsoft researchers studied healthrelated searches and conducted a survey of 515 employees, asking questions regarding their healthrelated searching. They found that when individuals conducted searches regarding common symptoms such as headache, there was a high probability of finding information related to serious conditions such as brain tumours, with a probability of co-occurrence of the terms ’headache’ and ’brain tumor’ of 0.26 in the top-10 Web search results, the same probability as cooccurrence of ’headache’ and ’caffeine withdrawal’. Searching for chest pain or muscle twitches could lead patients to believe they were experiencing a heart attack or had a fatal neurodegenerative condition, rather than more likely explanations such as indigestion and muscle strain, respectively. According to the results of the survey, three in four respondents have, at least once, "interpreted the ranking of Web search results as indicating the likelihood of the illnesses, with more likely diseases appearing higher up on the result page". Slightly less than one quarter of respondents frequently interpreted Web search results in this way, noted the researchers. White RW, et al. Cyberchondria: studies of the escalation of medical concerns in web search. Internet Document : [32 pages], 2008. Available from: URL: http:// 801108267 research.microsoft.com

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Inpharma 13 Dec 2008 No. 1668