Aimal Khan, MD1, Thaer Obeid, MD2, Renee Tholey, MD2, Alfred Trang, MD2, Ramsey Dallal, MD2. 1University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2Einstein Healthcare Network
Introduction: Despite being a reliable and effective long-term tool in combatting obesity, the percentage of people undergoing bariatric surgery has remained stagnant over the last decade. Public interest in bariatric surgery is one of the main drivers of its utilization, however measuring it using traditional methods is challenging.
Materials and Methods: Google Trends is a useful internet tool that can be used for quantifying public’s interest in a particular topic. It reports internet searches about a particular term as search volume indexes (SVIs). SVIs are normalized values based on total searches during a specified period for a given region. We queried Google trends for “bariatric surgery”, “gastric bypass”, “gastric sleeve”, and “lap band” from January 2004- April 2018 and analyzed their results.
Results: The results of this study show that the public’s interest in bariatric surgery has been steadily increasing since 2004 after falling to its lowest point in December 2010. We also show that the interest in lap band and gastric bypass has been gradually declining, with sleeve gastrectomy (SG) taking over the most searched bariatric procedure in 2018. State and city wise analysis show Michigan and New York City to have the highest proportion of Google searches for “bariatric surgery” respectively.
Discussion: Our study provides insight into the interest levels of US population in bariatric surgery. These findings can aid in the development of awareness campaigns via Internet, aimed at surgeons and the general public by helping better understand the US population’s interest and means of accessing information regarding bariatric surgery.
Presented at the SAGES 2017 Annual Meeting in Houston, TX.
Abstract ID: 95807
Program Number: P186
Presentation Session: Poster Session (Non CME)
Presentation Type: Poster